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Dutch East Indies, 1813.

Beneath the shores of Yogyakarta, a monster awakens.

August 31st, Tuesday.

Twenty-three-year old Mona is many things: she is short-tempered like the palace guards, she is sharp like the golden edge of a keris blade, and she is proud like the Sultan’s firstborn.

But above all, she is clever.

Clever enough to know concubinage means death. Death of the nights spent on her house’s rickety rooftop charting the stars, of the afternoons sneaking away to the old hag’s hut at the corner of her village to learn the names of constellations. Death of the soul, the brain, the mind; if not the body. Death of everything that makes her who she is.

So, here she is. Standing on a cliff’s edge that overlooks the crashing waves of the southern sea, above a grotto that’s said to be the home of… something. Something that can help her. Something that can kill her.

She grips her satchel, suddenly hesitant.

No. No, she cannot afford to back down now. She has already made up her mind. 

Anything is better than what she’s heard the keraton girls put themselves through.

For what feels like the hundredth time that day, Mona thinks of her mother.

This is the only way.

You’ll be safe there. Taken care of. Well-fed.

You won’t have to work a day in your life.

It’s not selfish, Mona tells herself. She’s not being selfish. She is doing this not just for herself and her mother, but for her people. Killing two birds with one stone, so to speak.

“I’m not being selfish,” she says out loud, for good measure.

The sea does not respond.

(Somewhere back home, her mother sits on the front porch.

I’ll come home before it gets dark, I promise. I love you, Ibu.)

For all that Hadiningrat Yogyakarta claims to worship one god, everyone knows they pay tithe to another. It is only natural. The ocean is as vast as it is merciless, and a kingdom that borders the southern seas is more vulnerable to its temper. Tsunamis, earthquakes, then the floods and volcanic eruptions that come right after. It doesn’t end there; it only opens a gateway for poverty and starvation. Homes washed away, entire rice fields destroyed. Resources dwindling until people turn their weapons on each other and fight to survive.

So the Sultan plays the long game. 

Rituals, dances, offerings. Sesajen that smells of jasmine flowers, and a woman dressed in green silk drowning under the moonlight every new year’s day. Always, always green; her favourite colour, the specific shade she is oddly possessive of. This, Mona recognises, is also an act of cleverness. Sacrificing one for the lives of many. 

Keep us safe, the corpse drifting away at sea seems to say. Bless our lands. Bless our people. Keep the foreign evil away, and keep us safe.

It works. The kingdom prospers, given the status of a special region by the powers that be. Crops flourish, forests grow, and all the babies born after each new tithe are strong and healthy. Even the demit that live on land seem to bother humans less in the weeks following certain rituals. From what Mona knows, they’re not even bound to the laws of the sea.

Her influence is just that powerful.

But. But.

Even her influence has limits.

The limits started showing a year ago.

When harvest season came, villages woke to withering crops. The closer the village was to the sea, the worse the crops rotted. Homes near forests became victims to mischievous demit, breaths snuffed out of the lungs of aging men and precious items disappearing into thin air. Small earthquakes, irregular storms; clouds that are just too dark for the Nusantara sky.

People panicked. Demanded answers from the Sultan. 

Are the offerings not enough? Surely, there’s been a mistake. What are we doing wrong? What more is she asking of us?

The answer came soon enough: she is not the cause. Something else is breaking the sacred vow Yogyakarta has made to her, something vengeful and lonely.

Mona takes a deep breath, stepping forward. A rock breaks beneath her sandals, crumbles to the roaring waves below.

The research she’s done to find this something hasn’t come easy. She is lucky for the old hag; without her, Mona wouldn’t have known where to start. And she is lucky she has a mother who taught her how to read. Old paper trails and word-of-mouth fables, hushed whispers of a failed creation too hideous for the sunlight to touch. A stolen report of a shipwrecked Dutch vessel, gone under mysterious circumstances. A diagram of a boat with its entire head ripped clean off. A document with scribbles of a monstrous being, or a man, depending on the angle you hold the paper.

He used to live in the deep, deep ocean, a spinster behind the keraton whispers to anyone who listens. Now he’s here. Closer to us. And he’s angry. He wants what she has, our Nyai, our goddess.

Mona takes off her sandals. She checks her clothes one last time, making sure she is wearing nothing that can be mistaken for green. Green means instant death; green means being dragged to the bottom of the ocean before she has the chance to voice her demands. Then she checks her omens; the gifts in her satchel, even the day and date. She has come on the day of her birth, a good Tuesday, wearing a brown kemben and a batik cloth that wraps around her legs. She carries with her three offerings.

There is no use prolonging this. Either she dies and nothing happens, or—

Or she dies and saves her country.

She looks back at the beach behind her.

“You’d better thank me,” she declares to no one in particular. Above her, stars glitter in the night sky. She recognises Orion, Canis Major, Cygnus. She commits the sight to memory, knowing this is the last time she’s ever going to see them. “The Sultan’s not doing anything to save you. But I am. Isn’t that funny?”

Closing her eyes, she jumps off the cliff and to the water below.

*

Everything explodes with pressure.

She drifts through the raging sea, water flooding her lungs and cutting off the oxygen in her bloodstream as the current throws her every which way. Her arms, legs, and chest burns; her back hits the jagged edges of something hard, tearing into her skin. The waves roar in her ear, deafening, overwhelming. 

It smothers the sound of her own helpless screaming.

And then—

Nothing.

Just pure darkness, even as she blinks. Even as she grapples around the current, the air returning to her lungs. She is floating in a stretch of pitch black. 

And then, like the bedtime stories and old wives’ tales, the nothingness ends with the smell of jasmine flowers. 

Mona stands, her feet suddenly planted against a rockbed. The water disappears, receding until it only reaches her feet.

The cave that surrounds her is the largest she’s ever seen. There’s stone at every side, boxing her in, and the rockbed underneath her feet rises at a sloped angle as it leads to the rest of the grotto. The ground is strangely dry, almost clean, despite the cave connecting to the ocean. Somewhere in the distant ceiling above her is a small hole where slivers of moonlight pierce through.

She doesn’t need the moonlight to see, though. Not when the cave is overflowing with treasure, precious gemstones and jewels lining every corner and crevice. Some of the gemstones have been fashioned into necklaces and bracelets; others are laid out in the open, their blinding shine casting a multicoloured glow on its surroundings.

She forgets about the cold, then; forgets that she’s drenched from head to toe, that shivers run down her spine every time the wind blows against the water droplets still clinging to her skin. Everything becomes the cave, the gems, the jewels, and Mona doesn’t think she’s ever seen jewels actually glittering like that. Even the princesses back in the capital aren’t in possession of such vain wealth.

(Somewhere back home, her mother stitches back an old, torn kebaya.

Ibu, listen—listen. If the sun has set and you still don’t see me, come to the beach. Look under the lone tree on the cliff’s edge.)

Her research has hinted that the creature is something of a collector, but seeing the real thing still takes her breath away. The more she observes, the more she begins noticing other riches; piles of silk so finely threaded they reflect on the gems stacked on top of them, rows of gold bars arranged in lines, multicoloured pearls scattered across the rockbed. She is almost blinded by the sheer opulence. Resting her eyes, she looks sideways to find—

“Books,” she gasps. Ledgers, novels, and scrolls huddle together in a grand pile of everything Mona values most. Different scripts form the cover pages, most of them the Dutchmen’s foreign Latin script, but she spots a few written in Hanacaraka.

Curious, she reaches for the closest book—

From the opposite end of the cave, a voice clears its throat.

“In case you haven’t noticed,” says the voice, laced with dry humor, “you’re in my house.”

A shiver runs through her again, but this time, the cold has nothing to do with it.

The creature has chosen to remain where the gemstones’ light doesn’t touch, so all she sees are its eyes. Eerily human, soft and rounded at the edges, with a colour like the deep ocean. But what sets them apart is unlike human eyes, they glow—brighter than its collection of gemstones, brighter than anything it owns in this cave.

“Ngapunten,” Mona offers, steeling her resolve. I’m sorry.

The creature snorts. “Were you going to rob me blind before I stopped you?”

“No,” she shakes her head, unhooking her satchel. She sets it on the ground in front of her, “I’ve come to make a deal, in exchange for everything I’ve brought with me.”

“A deal?” something about how the creature speaks… irritates her. Even past the fear she’s feeling, past the terror that grips her stomach. She stifles the irritation, though—the creature might be capable of sensing it. “I can’t say I’ve made those before.”

She opens her satchel and shows the insides: bangles, earrings, and a piece of paper that contains the proof of her intellect. Everything is soggy and dripping with seawater, but the paper—lacquered and polished with her own hard work—is still intact, thank the gods.

“Is that it?” asks the creature. “Take a look at what’s around you. I’m not exactly desperate.”

“I have more, but I ask that you listen to me first,” she says. 

Finally, the creature steps into the light.

Mona’s heart drops to her stomach.

The creature is half-human, half… something. Though his features are delicate like a woman’s, he has a man’s chest; pale and bare, covered in layers of gold necklaces crusted with emeralds. He stands about a head taller than her, dressed in a silk cloth—green, trimmed with scarlet hibiscus flowers—that starts above his torso and ends where the human part of him stops.

And that—that is where she thinks her vision is failing her.

The lower part of him is an ever-changing amalgamation of legs and thick, roiling tentacles. He blurs at the edges like a mirage; every time she focuses on the legs, the tentacles become clear, and every time she focuses on the tentacles, the legs make dents in the rockbed. All she is certain of is that if he has legs, he has two of them, and if he has tentacles, he has many, many, many of them. Each differing in length and girth. Only after comprehending his full form does she notice the tips of his fingers are blackened at the edges, the same colour as his tendrils.

Of course, he smells like jasmines. Pungent and syrupy, almost suffocating. She’s smelled it before once or twice when the sun has set and the night feels a little odd, but never like this. Never this strong.

One of his tentacles brush against a gemstone, toppling it over a pile of other jewels.

Demit, Mona thinks with dread. Although, in that moment, the other word for his kind comes to mind: lelembut. Soft creatures.

“Why are they called that?” Mona asks, swinging her legs over her mother’s chair. She’s five years old, and she wants to know everything there is to know in this world. The skies, the sea, the earth—even the strange shadow people that the neighbour’s boy claims to live in the woods.

“Because you can’t touch most of them,” her mother answers, folding a joint pile of their clothes somewhere behind her. “If you tried, your hand would pass through their body like trying to catch smoke. They can’t touch you either, don’t worry—they can’t touch anything that belongs to this world.”

“Most of them?”

“Mm. Some of them are solid.”

“Oh,” she nods. That makes sense. Mona turns to meet her mother’s eyes, “What do I do if I meet a solid one?”

“You run, silly girl,” her mother sounds exasperated. “What else can you do?”

“What makes you think I won’t kill you right now?” he asks almost pleasantly, like he’s discussing the weather. 

Mona swallows, her legs turning weak.

(Somewhere back home, her mother prepares a sesajen of flowers in a pot of water.

There are other ways. There has to be another way.

I would rather—please, please. I would rather be poor with you than locked up behind palace gates.)

“I followed your rules,” she says, forcing her voice to steady. “I brought gifts, and I have nothing green on me.”

“My mother’s rules,” the creature hisses. She doesn’t even have time to settle with the reveal before he gestures at her face, “And that’s not true, either. You still have something green.”

The fear inside her vanishes immediately upon hearing the senseless remark, replaced by white-hot anger.

It’s not fair. It’s not fair at all, and this thing—this tentacled monster living in a cave, this senseless beast who’s done nothing but torment her people—has no right to speak to her like that. She doesn’t care how powerful he is. Mona has the look of a native woman through and through, and that is all that matters to her. Hair dark as ebony, skin the shade of ripe sawo fruits—everything about her is the colour of her home, of Yogyakarta and the land it sits on.

Everything except her eyes. A startling burst of bright green that she cannot seem to escape, not even now, as she is about to die in a grotto by the sea.

Mona’s mother was born and raised in Yogyakarta. There’s not a drop of foreign blood in her veins, and she’s never even been outside the borders of the kingdom. Her father, on the other hand—

Is a monster, she cuts off her own train of thought before it can fully form. It hurts too much, and it is better to simplify it into something she can digest. Something she can chew in her mouth and spit out whenever she wants. My father is a monster who left my mother for dead, and that’s that. There is nothing more to the story.

“Yes, well,” she grits her teeth, forgetting that she is speaking to a different monster as she lets her irritation get the best of her, “unfortunately, I can’t exactly take off my eyes. I’d have to gouge them out with my bare hands. It’s a terribly tedious process, and I’d like to be able to see my final moments in this world.”

The creature blinks, visibly stunned.

He’s going to kill me now, Mona thinks, and prepares to be smited. Or flayed. Or torn limb from limb. After what she has said, she does not expect a merciful death.

Instead, the tip of the creature’s mouth quirks in amusement. “What is your name?”

“Mona,” she answers, hesitant.

“Mona,” the creature rolls the syllables in his tongue, as if he’s testing the sound. “You come into my house uninvited, you offer me this… sad, lonely pile of trinkets, and then you disrespect me. All this in the two minutes you’ve spoken to me. I’m almost impressed, to be honest. Though I still haven’t found a single reason why I shouldn’t kill you.”

“I know what you want, and I know why you are doing this,” she declares, putting the pieces together. So he is the goddess’ offspring. She can work with that.

He tilts his head. “What do I want, and what am I doing?”

“You have to listen to me first,” she repeats firmly. 

He scoffs. His eyes sweep downwards, “You haven’t stopped shivering since you got here. Am I that hideous to look at?”

“Not at all.” Mona wiggles her arms, shaking off the water droplets. “I’m not sure how it works for your kind, but humans experience something called being cold.”

The creature rolls his eyes, which is an incredibly human expression, ironically. To his side, a tentacle moves; Mona’s just about to dodge instinctively when the black appendage lifts a roll of silk and unfurls it in the air, settling it over her shoulders.

More green, she observes, touching the fabric.

“Explain,” he turns his back, retreating further inside the cave, “or I toss your corpse out for the sharks to eat.”

Mona grabs her satchel and runs after him, the silk sagging after her. Unlike before, he glides over the stone, and she wonders if he changed how he walks on purpose so she would have a hard time catching up to him. “You haven’t told me your name.”

“Is that necessary?”

“I’d like to know the name of the person who wants to kill me.”

“I don’t want to kill you anymore than you’d want to kill a cockroach,” he dismisses. “You see it in your house, it bothers you, so you stomp on it. Simple as that.”

“I don’t stomp on cockroaches,” Mona says indignantly. 

The creature glares. “I’m not a patient man.”

“Fine. It is necessary,” she huffs. “I need to know your name if I am to explain why you’re hurting my people.”

He clenches his jaw. “Kunikuzushi,” he says after a long pause.

“Sounds foreign.”

“My mother—your goddess—didn’t bother to name me,” he sneers. Another one of his tentacles moves again, this time lifting a book. Mona catches it before it drops to the rockbed, and like his name, the book is foreign too. She doesn’t even recognise the script it is using. “I found this in a ship from the East. The name comes from one of the stories inside.”

“What happened to the ship?”

He shrugs. “It’s somewhere on the seabed.”

“And the people on it? Where are they?”

Kunikuzushi stops walking. “Everywhere,” he says vaguely. “Sharks don’t swim in packs.”

Mona stills. Vomit builds at the back of her throat. Then she shakes it off—forces herself to shake it off—and sets the book down.

“I will begin with what you’re doing,” she clears her throat, meeting his eyes.

Kunikuzushi faces her, sitting on a makeshift throne made of carved rock and soft cushions—green, always green. A few of his tentacles rise from the ground, tilting forward as if listening to her.

It is a terribly uncanny sight. 

“You have some kind of grudge against her,” she starts with the obvious. Work from the basic facts, so the old hag taught her when she first learned to chart the stars. “At first, I wondered what kind of demit was strong enough to openly dislike her, but now that I know she’s your mother, it makes sense. I won’t pry into someone else’s family problems—that’s none of my business. What is my business is that you have dragged the rest of us into this grudge. We didn’t ask for this,” she clasps her hand to her chest. “You’re hurting us, because you can’t hurt her.”

“I haven’t hurt you,” Kunikuzushi scowls, as if he takes personal offense at being made to confront his own actions. 

“The storms,” Mona retorts.

“A byproduct of my mood swings. I’m not the happiest person in the world—I’m sure you can see why.”

“The withering crops.”

“The foreigners and their railway projects have a larger effect on your land than you think.”

That is… admittedly, that possibility didn’t cross her mind. She has seen Dutchmen dumping their waste in rivers and water sources before, come to think of it.

“You’re making other demit attack us,” Mona pulls out her trump card. This is one thing he shouldn’t be able to deny his involvement in.

“I’m not making anyone do anything,” he denies it anyway, somehow. She wonders how someone can have this magnitude of audacity, but then remembers that he’s the child of the sea goddess—and a man, at that. Powerful and male, an excruciatingly insufferable combination. “I’m just weakening my mother’s influence over them. What they do with their newfound freedom is… what did you say earlier? Oh,” he claps his hand, “none of my business.”

Mona bites the inside of her cheek. 

“I can’t think of anything that should be more of your business than that,” she curls her lip. “The fact is that they didn’t bother us before, and they’re bothering us now. Because of you. Because you don’t like your mother very much, and somehow, we have to pay the price of that.”

“If there’s a point to your argument, you’re awfully slow at getting to it.”

This bastard—

“You want recognition,” Mona goes on before she can say something she’ll regret. “That’s it, isn’t it? That’s what you want. You want to be worshipped and revered the way your mother is. You want the sesajen and riceflour dolls from newlyweds every Anggoro Kasih. You want the dances, the songs, the gamelan stories about how big and scary you are.”

His eyes darken with anger. “Watch your mouth.”

“I can understand that,” she softens the blow, even though she doesn’t understand him at all. He is nothing more than a spoiled tyrant to her, an arrogant young prince powerless under the true source of his rage. “That’s why I’ve come here. I want to make a deal with you.”

“In exchange for your trinkets,” Kunikuzushi says dryly, “yes, I remember that part.”

“They’re not trinkets,” Mona pulls the items out, laying them down on the rockbed one by one. “I don’t have the keraton’s time or money to prepare the offerings they can give, but that doesn’t make mine any less valuable. These are the only pair of bangles I own. These earrings are from my mother, and they’re the prettiest thing I brought with me. And this,” she holds up the piece of paper, “is my first diagram.”

“Diagram?”

“Of the stars,” she clarifies. “I like to study them.”

“You’re a scholar,” Kunikuzushi observes.

The word catches her off-guard. Scholar. Mona has never once thought of using that word to describe herself, or even the old hag who taught her everything she knows. Scholars are straightlaced priyayi with their leatherbound literature and their pavilion talks; scholars are the Dutchmen who visit remote villages to watch girls bathing in the river the same way they watch birds. It is a title, a blessing; you must be a certain kind of person to call yourself a scholar, and that person never looks like her.

“Not quite,” she mumbles. “Though I’d like to be.”

Kunikuzushi clicks his tongue, plucking the diagram from her grip with a single swipe of his tentacle. The tip brushes against her fingers, smooth and sinuous, jolting her nerves. “A scholar is someone who studies useless things, aren’t they?” he looks at the paper’s contents, flipping it upside-down. “Someone who spends too much time with their noses buried inside a book that they forget the world around them. Sounds like you.”

“I’m a woman.”

“Which is relevant because…?”

“Women can’t be scholars,” Mona says matter-of-factly.

Kunikuzushi scoffs. “Anyone idealistic enough to chase after the stars is a scholar in my book, woman or otherwise. What’s this diagram even of?”

“The Orion constellation,” she answers. “You can see it from the cliff just outside of your cave, actually. I wrote the names of the stars that form the main pattern. I—” she doesn’t know how much she should share. Is it polite, to tell one’s life story to the creature that will eventually kill them? “My mother taught me how to write.”

“Mm. Your handwriting’s a mess,” he comments, then sets aside the paper—atop the nearest pile of books, as if her amateur diagram somehow belongs there as well.

Her heart jumps.

“So? What do you want in exchange for your valuable garbage?”

“Leave Yogyakarta alone,” she says quickly. “Stop hurting my people; stop hurting people who don’t deserve it. And—” 

(Somewhere back home, her mother—

Her mother.

This is the only way.

You’ll have to give up the stars; the Sultan might not like that.

And you can’t just run around whenever you want anymore.

No, no—don’t say that. Don’t look at me like that. 

I love you.

Somewhere, somewhere back home—

Her mother is at home, waiting for her to come back, and Mona is somewhere she cannot reach.)

“And spare one gemstone,” she forces the words out. “Or a bar of gold. Whatever you’re most comfortable parting with. Spare—spare just one, and put it under the tree on the cliff. That’s the same one I mentioned earlier, the one just outside your cave. It—” she falters, voice trembling— “it’s dark. There is no one at the beach, if you don’t want to be seen.”

“An oddly specific request,” Kunikuzushi remarks.

“That last one’s for my mother,” she says. 

His expression sours at the mention of mothers. Somehow, the gemstones’ glow seems to dim just slightly. 

“What you are asking of me is no small thing,” he muses. “The gemstones, I can spare, but the games I’ve been playing with your kingdom… I’m not eager to end the fun just yet. Didn’t you say you had more gifts?”

A cold, ice-water feeling overtakes her. This is it; this is where her story comes to a close.

Mona has never imagined what her own death might look like. She has imagined many ludicrous things; discovering a new star, and, more impossibly, accepting recognition for that discovery. But death—the fate that comes for everyone in the end, the fate that not even kings and colonisers can run from—has always been nothing more than a distant dream. Something she must face someday, certainly, but not today. Not while her mother still walks.

You’re going to need someone to take care of you after I’m gone.

Find a husband. There are many good men in this village.

Yes, yes—of course they’ll want children. It will hurt at first. But you’ll get used to it, eventually.

You are stronger than me. 

So there’s never been a clear picture of death in her mind. She has no expectations. There doesn’t seem to be an ideal way to die.

She is fine with this.

Mona takes a deep breath and lowers herself to the floor, kneeling before him the same way she’d kneel for the Sultan. Stone digs into her skin, scraping against the rockbed with how much she’s shaking.

At this, Kunikuzushi’s tendrils twitch with interest.

“The biggest offering your mother gets are the yearly sacrifices,” Mona says. “And since we’ve established you want what she has, I can give that to you. I can—” she chokes on the word, fumbling, but soldiers on— “I can be your first sacrifice.”

Kunikuzushi stares at her. 

“What?”

Mona snaps to attention, confused. Flabbergasted, really. The tone of his voice does not match the gravity of her offering at all.

“I’m—I will be your first sacrifice,” she stutters.

“My first sacrifice,” he repeats, brows furrowed, “to die, you mean?”

“Yes,” she scrunches the cloth around her shoulders, pulling it close. “To die, or—or to eat, if you’re the type—”

“You think I eat people?” Kunikuzushi exclaims, mildly offended. “What kind of—is it the tentacles? It’s the tentacles, isn’t it?”

“I just thought—the shipwrecks—”

“I don’t eat the sailors, you fool,” he says, running a hand through his hair. “Leave it to humans to make ridiculous assumptions of me based on what I look like.”

“I apologise for thinking you’re a man-eating monster,” she says sarcastically. The macabre atmosphere of sacrifice shrivels to nothing as her irritation returns tenfold, and she curses him for not even permitting her the grace of a dramatic death. “The reports of sunken ships gave me the wrong idea, but I see the error of my ways. It won’t happen again.”

Kunikuzushi squints his eyes. “You must think you’re so clever.”

“I do, actually.”

He shakes his head, incredulous. “You came here to die.”

“Just earlier, you said you’d kill me,” Mona grumbles. “I thought you’d be happy to know our interests are aligned.”

“Now that I know you were planning to die, killing you doesn’t interest me anymore,” Kunkuzushi complains, as if it’s her fault that the idea of murdering her has suddenly lost its appeal. Poor cave monster, deprived of his silly pleasures. “Why are you so willing to cut your life short, anyway?”

A letter from the palace. A box of silks for her to wear. A personal summon from the Sultan—the beady-eyed Sultan, the aging Sultan—who saw her crossing the street from his carriage one sunny afternoon. A mother encouraging her to answer, to trap herself in a fate she is powerless to change.

Whispers—not of monsters, but of girls. Girls slipping needles under pillows. Girls hiding grass snakes inside bedsheets. Girls sending poison disguised as perfume, as red sugar cake, as plates of fried sagu. All in a desperate reach for the Sultan’s love—not because they want him, but because they want the glory and safety that comes with bearing his son.

I won’t do it. I won’t hurt girls—other girls—for something like this.

“There’s nothing waiting for me back home,” she breathes, an ache in her chest. “If I stay, I have to become a concubine, but I don’t have the money to run away.”

“What kind of idiot would take someone like you as a concubine?” he scoffs.

“For once, we’re in agreement,” Mona mumbles. She looks at him, helpless and cornered, “I cannot go back. Whatever happens, I can never go back. If all you can do is spare the gold in exchange for my life, then so be it, but don’t send me back.”

For what little it is worth, Kunikuzushi genuinely looks as though he is considering her words. He leans back on his makeshift throne, fingers tapping a tilted part of the stone that resembles armchairs, his expression scrunching in deep thought. Ocean eyes, sharp lines, porcelain skin. If they had met under different circumstances, she might have found him attractive.

He’s her son. Of course he would be beautiful like her.

Mona has only ever seen her depicted in paintings, but each artwork of her delivers beauty with every brushstroke.

“You’ll get the gold,” Kunikuzushi says, “for yourself, and for your mother.”

Mona gapes, dumbfounded. She can’t believe what she is hearing. “For myself?”

“Mm. And I’ll stop tearing holes in my mother’s veil over my kind—for now, at least. Nothing I can do about the storms, unless your beloved sea goddess finally sees fit to acknowledge me as her creation, but the demit attacks will cease.” Kunikuzushi surveys his nails, “You can take the gold and run. Or combine your share with your mother’s, flee together. I don’t particularly care.”

“That’s very generous,” she says carefully. “I’m assuming you want something else in exchange.”

“At least you’re half as clever as you claimed to be,” he snickers. “Wherever you run off to, spread word of my name. Tell people the sea goddess has a son, and he’s just as terrible as she is.” 

Just as terrible, and twice as vain. 

She hears the roar of the ocean behind her once more.

“And,” Kunikuzushi’s voice softens, “you still have to make a sacrifice. It just won’t be your life.”

It is then—and only then—that Mona becomes painfully aware of their positions. Her, on her knees before him, her face to his abdomen as he towers over her.

A tentacle reaches forward, curling under the silk around her back and sliding it off. 

“What do you want?” Mona braves herself to ask, even when she knows the answer.

“Nothing you can’t give,” he hums. The tentacle glides over her shoulder, her neck, her collarbone, surprisingly gentle as it settles under her chin and tilts her head up. “Nothing you can’t bear to part with.”

“You told me only an idiot would take me for a concubine,” she reminds.

“An idiot,” Kunikuzushi affirms, “or a madman. I’m curious to see which one I am.”

She supposes she should be grateful. Before, it was her life for her country. Now it is her dignity for her country, and the dignity of a peasant woman with an awful habit of climbing rooftops just to stargaze isn’t worth all that much. What he’s asking isn’t so abhorrent either; just the marital act, performed only once, and then Mona is free.

And maybe she should have seen this coming. Human or spirit, Dutch or native—a man is a man, and men are predictable. Predictable, and clumsy, and foolish, all the things women in her life have told her. So why—

Why is he being so gentle?

Another tentacle joins, finding the gap between her top and her cloth where skin meets air. It feels warm like a human body as it rubs the side of her torso, tracing circular patterns. And if her silence tugs at his impatience, he doesn’t show it; he simply looks at her, half-lidded eyes pinned on her as if she’s the only thing in the world that exists to him. As if the treasure behind her, the shimmering gemstones and bars of gold, pale in comparison to the sight of her.

… She is losing her mind.

It’s going to be painful, she chastises herself. Painful at first, before it settles into a dull, bearable ache for the rest of the act. Like carrying a durian fruit with just your arms, her mother says. You get used to the spikes eventually, and by the time you come home with the fruit, you can barely feel it anymore.

“Why?” she asks, barely a whisper.

He shrugs. “Boredom. Spite. Curiosity, as I said before. Pick your poison.”

“It will hurt,” Mona blurts, even though she has already accepted that. “You’re not human, and—and—and it will hurt. More than it already does.”

Kunikuzushi smirks. “No, it won’t. I can promise you that.”

She knows better than to trust the words of a demit. Especially one like him. And maybe—maybe Yogyakarta doesn’t need her as much as she thought. Maybe this kingdom that has survived the split of Mataram and the invasion of foreigners can weather through this monster without her help. But her mother—

“Okay,” she nods, swallowing. My country, my mother. “Okay. Okay. I—you can have—okay.”

Kunikuzushi stands, offering her a hand.

Mona takes it. 

*

Her name is Mona.

Kunikuzushi has never assigned a name for her in the years she haunted his mind, so the reveal of her name comes like a rush of ecstasy for him. It is perfect in every way; two syllables, similar consonants, vowels that roll off the tongue smoothly. He could say it over and over, Mona, Mona, Mona.

Mona with her seafoam green eyes. Mona with her stern gaze. Mona with her sharp tongue, whether she is ten or fourteen or twenty-three years old. When she crawled into his cave smelling of seasalt and fear, he felt like a little boy again, hiding behind a rock and keeping half his body submerged so she couldn’t see the horror beneath. But she saw back then, and she didn’t care. Called him stupid, called him fat, called him ugly—but not for the tentacles.

Now, it is the same. She is still the same girl who hates him, not because of his monstrosity, but regardless of it.

Now, he is older.

Now, he has her lying underneath him on his bed.

Her body has matured over the years. Curves soft as kisses, plush thighs straining against that cheap cotton cloth of hers. She should wear silk, always. Breasts stifled by her kemben, hardened nipples visible through the fabric. Wide hips, made to be held by steady hands. And her eyes, always, always her eyes—and always, always green.

She would be the crown jewel of his mother’s kingdom, if he were to let that woman take her. His mother’s collection of pretty girls is one that expands each year, but a pretty girl with pretty eyes is something she would drown cities for. Unfortunately for her, Mona is his by right; she came to him first, and the goddess of the sea wouldn’t dare ruin the fragile peace she has with her son.

“You’re stiff as a board,” he teases.

Mona blinks, dark lashes on tanned skin. She truly is stiff as a board—hands to her sides like she’s performing a ritual march for the Sultan. When he brought her to his room, she immediately took her position on his bed and laid down like this without any prompting on his part. “My mother says this position hurts the least,” she states. “And the easiest one, too. Doesn’t take up too much energy.”

“You speak as if you’re going to be doing any of the work,” he snorts. 

“The… work?”

“Yes, fool. The work.” He slides a knuckle down the path of her leg. “You think intimacy is effortless?”

Mona looks like she’s genuinely mulling over his words, which is a little funny to observe, if he’s being honest. She has a habit of scrunching her brows when she thinks, and when the thinking gets a bit too hard, her mouth puckers. “I thought it would be more like pigs.”

Like—

She cannot be serious.

“Tell me I misheard,” Kunikuzushi says. “Tell me you didn’t just call me a pig to my face, while I’m about to undress you.”

“I didn’t mean it like that,” she argues. “I meant… I thought bedding between people is like bedding between pigs. You—you know—have you seen it before? I don’t think there are pigs in this cave.” She looks around, as if she is going to magically find a pig wandering in his home. “Well—the male pig mounts the female pig, and it moves its hips back and forth. There’s no rhythm to it. It finishes, um—I don’t know when it finishes, actually. I’ve never stayed around that long to watch. It makes my stomach sick. But the neighbour’s girl says…”

Is this how Mona behaves when she’s flustered? Incessant rambling, flushed cheeks, useless anecdotes of a life he’s never been part of?

… He finds it frustratingly adorable.

Laughing, Kunikuzushi takes her by the wrist and pulls her up, placing her on his lap. She lets out a squeak, and never was a sound so sweet.

“I told you it won’t hurt, and I meant it,” he says. “But there’s only so much I can do. You stay this tense, and you’re only going to make things more difficult for yourself.”

She takes in his words like he’s giving a sermon, a lesson about the stars she seems so fond of; nodding and concentrating, nodding and concentrating. “I don’t want it to hurt,” Mona says, adjusting her seat on his lap—her soft backside to the bones of his thigh, an incredibly distracting sensation. His tentacles curl inwards at the pressure, but she doesn’t notice. “Does this position hurt less? Is that why you pulled me up?”

Kunikuzushi comes to two realisations, then:

The first, that the girl he has spent the better part of his life obsessing over is nosy, inexperienced, and far too blunt for her own good.

The second, that this does not lessen his fixation on her. It only worsens it.

He cradles her cheek and bridges the gap between them, unable to restrain himself any longer. She makes that squeaking sound again, muffled, hands jumping to his chest as he captures her lips in a searing kiss. The taste of her blooms in his mouth, warm and sugary—like riceflour cakes, like jasmine, like the sunlight he often shies away from. In a grand show of patience, Kunikuzushi doesn’t slide his tongue in just yet; he takes his time, tracing the corners of her lips—dissecting her, committing the shape of her to memory. My offering, my sacrifice; my Mona.

His patience is rewarded when she relaxes, shoulders drooping. He seizes what he wants, then, pushing his tongue past her mouth. She gasps, but all it does is cut him a wider berth; he claims her full and grips her jaws to keep her locked in place. Her breathing turns ragged, and that is when he remembers her mortality.

So he forces himself to break the kiss. It is painful, torturous—especially when he sees the trail of saliva connecting them together, and a tremor passes through his tentacles. They’ve always been a little different from his arms and legs; they are a part of him, yes, but sometimes he catches them moving before he wills them to. Sometimes they grab a book or a drink or a treat before he even thinks to crave it, sometimes they cushion his fall by instinct when he trips over a carelessly placed jewel. This time, they want nothing more than to have their way with a girl, and the only thing preventing them—

Is me, Kunikuzushi thinks. If he cuts the metaphorical leash that keeps them held back, what are they going to do to his Mona? How curious. How frightening.

“That was…” she clasps her hand to her chest, steadying herself. “I’ve heard of it before, but I’ve never…”

He kisses her jaw. “Tilt your head back.”

She obeys wordlessly.

He kisses her chin, her neck, her pulse. Nibbles it softly; enough to remind her he can tear through her flesh at any moment, but chooses not to.

“What’s the—ah, what’s the purpose of this?” Mona asks when he moves further down, peppering kisses over her open shoulders. He nips at her clavicle, sucking gently; the mewl she produces is all he needs to know this is one of her sensitive area. “When I—when the other girls or the m-married women talk abo—oh, about what happens in the—the bedroom, they never mentioned this.”

“That’s because they’re trapped in rather disappointing marriages,” he comments, biting the top of her chest just where her kemben begins.

“I don’t think so,” she argues. “They seem—ah, happy. Some of them have many children.”

“Does having children always come by choice?”

She tenses again, and that’s—hm. He will need to tread carefully around the subject.

But the tension melts when two of his tentacles begin massaging her sides, rubbing over her cloth. One of them skitters dangerously close to the knot that holds the cloth together, and he reigns it back quickly. Not yet, he tells himself, tells the mischievous set of appendages he’s been cursed with from birth. These things take time.

Kunikuzushi pulls back, and Mona feels a twinge of disappointment—something she promptly chastises herself for, because it makes no sense. She is about to lose her maidenhood to a monster that lives in a cave; she should be grateful if he decides to divert his attention elsewhere. This isn’t the stuff of daydreams.

His attention doesn’t divert, though. Instead, he crooks his fingers under the folds of her kemben and tugs it down.

Cold air meets her breasts, and Mona shivers instinctively. She has been shivering nonstop since entering this cave, with a different blame each time; the cold, the fear. Now it is both, and her hands jump to cover her chest.

Anger returns to his eyes, mixed with desire—so palpable that it almost scares her. She doesn’t think anyone has ever wanted her this much. 

“Don’t cover yourself,” he says, tendrils wrapping around her wrists and pulling them apart. “I already told you; I’m not a patient man.”

Before she can form a response, Kunikuzushi surges forward and closes his mouth over one nipple. His hand cups her other breast, firm but surprisingly gentle, squeezing softly as his arm wraps around her waist. Soon, Mona is laid back down on his bed of green silk sheets, and he hovers above her to keep suckling at her chest. Heat ripples on her skin everywhere he touches, whether it’s his mouth or his fingers or the flat of his palms, and it—unsettles her. Not so much as discomfort as it is alien. She has felt flickers of this sensation before, when a boy smiles at her, or when the other village girls strip to bathe in front of her—but never so intense like this.

“Pretty girl,” Kunikuzushi murmurs into her chest.

Wetness blooms between her thighs. 

He kisses the underside of her breast, then kisses the other one before his hand lets go. His head moves from her chest, marking a path of kisses down her abdomen, and she is just about to breathe a sigh of relief—because even though it burns there, too, it is not so unbearable. It doesn’t scald, doesn’t force her to make those girlish noises she can’t silence. But then the tentacles at her sides rise to her chest, curling around her peaks, and she understands; dealing with a demit is rarely so easy.

“Kuniku—K-Kuni—Kuni,” Mona tries. Wriggles around, tugs her hands, only for the tendrils on her wrists to remind her of their presence. “It—that feels—”

“I like that,” he says, grazing his teeth over her ribcage. “Call me that again.”

“I—ah?”

The tentacle on her breast grips hard, pinching her nipple. 

“Kuni,” she keens helplessly.

“There we go,” he purrs, satisfied. He continues further, never breaking eye contact. Stops only when he is between her legs, her cloth scrunched and gathered to her waist with how he forces himself there. She feels his hand grabbing her ankles, and a tentacle slithers to view, finding the knot that binds her cloth. Mona watches with horror—she tells herself it’s horror, because she cannot bear the alternative—as the organ pulls the knot loose, and her entire cloth falls apart with it.

“Wait,” Mona strains, moving her wrists again—and being restrained by the tendrils again. “Wait, what—what are you—”

“This is common,” Kunikuzushi says casually, but there is an undeniable hunger in his gaze as he focuses on her naked cunt. His throat bobs; is he swallowing his own spit? That’s a very human gesture. “It makes the actual lovemaking smoother.”

Lovemaking? What on earth is he talking about?

“Wait,” she repeats. 

He does not wait. He grins and puts his mouth on her.

Mona knows hunger. She is a peasant girl born to a native mother and an absent Dutchman father; of course she knows hunger. Knows the death rattle of an empty stomach, knows what it means to survive off of grain for weeks on end. But when Kunikuzushi consumes her—when he kisses and licks and devours where no one has ever touched—she thinks, This is new. Hunger for the body, hunger for touch; hunger for the taste of her slick, chasing every last drop with a swirling tongue.

And she—

She panics.

“Kuni,” she cries, legs thrashing. More tentacles restraining her; more black limbs to hold her thighs still. Four on her legs, two on her wrists, and the roiling mass behind him. Just how many does he have?

Kunikuzushi pauses briefly. “I don’t control them,” he says, the vibration of his voice sending a spark through her legs. “Not completely, at least. So if you move, and they react… I can’t help you.”

“That—that’s a lie,” she accuses.

“Maybe,” he concedes, mischievous. “But what can you do about it?”

Then he dives back in, dragging his tongue over her entrance. When he reaches her clit, he circles around it before giving it an open-mouthed kiss. She moans, and his eyes glint with something wicked—something that tells her any reaction she gives is only going to further feed his amusement. But there is nothing she can do to escape those eyes, not when they stare at her like that; unblinking and razor-focused.

Is there an end? There has to be. Kunikuzushi said this is something that’s done to make the lovemaking smoother, which means this isn’t where she finishes. Just as she thinks about it—just as she wonders how much more of this she can take, how much longer he plans to torment her—his tongue pushes inwards, and she swears, she swears, it doubles in size.

“Oh my god,” Mona sighs.

She’s not—she is not hallucinating. It is doubling in size, and it’s extending inside her. Kunikuzushi laps up her inner walls the same way he did outside, but the burn feels twice as hot, and his dexterous tongue finds parts of her that she didn’t even know existed. She can’t push his head away; her wrists are pinned. She can’t close her legs; her thighs are pinned. All she can do is say his name, a mumbled stream of Kuni, Kuni, Kuni.

It would be easier if he’s just touching her cunt. If he’s not lying through his teeth about being unable to control the tentacles, if he’s not groping and massaging her chest while he eats his fill between her thighs. But the more she dissolves under tongue and teeth, the more enthusiastic the tentacles seem to become, until she’s left dizzy and short of breath just from having her nipples played with. Her head is spinning, and she can’t think, can’t think, can’t think, overwhelmed by the scent of jasmines that grow heavier by the minute.

“Please,” she cries. “Please, I…”

What is he getting out of this? She is not touching him; he receives nothing on his end. But he seems to take no issue with pleasuring her. Could it be that he feeds on her pleasure, then? No, no—he’s the son of the sea goddess, and he ranks higher than that kind of demit. Mona tries to come up with a reasonable answer, anything to distract herself from the coil building inside her, but nothing works. She is bound to this just as she is bound to him.

(There is, of course, the obvious: that is he is doing this because he wants to. Because her pleasure means as much to him as his own. 

But that makes no sense. That goes against everything she has been taught of men; that they are selfish, on top of being predictable and clumsy and foolish.

Your father—he’s a soldier, I think. I remember his uniform. I remember the flag.

So she doesn’t dwell on it.)

Kunikuzushi slows down only when she breaks, only when that coil releases and a wave of euphoria washes over her. She is grateful for the cushion beneath her head; she might have hurt herself on the stone bedframe otherwise, when she cranes her head backwards and moans wantonly.

Mona is still trembling from the aftermath when he pulls himself upright. There is a hand on her stomach, and she doesn’t know if he means to keep her pushed down or if it’s a strange method of reassurance. All she knows is that he is still staring at her, this time with a keen sharpness—as if he is analysing her, picking her apart piece by piece in an attempt to figure out what makes her tick.

“You are tense again,” he observes. 

“I’m…” she isn’t sure how she is meant to respond. “That—what you did—no one has ever done that to me before.”

“I’m sure,” he sounds amused. The tentacles on her chest loosen their grip slightly, the pinches and pulls of her nipples fading into light touches, but the ones tying her legs and wrists remain strong as ever. “I have something that might be able to help. Do you want it?”

“Help in what way?” she asks warily.

His other hand rests on her thigh, just above where a tendril is currently wrapped and squeezing. “Help you feel at ease,” he says. “Help you trust me more.”

“But I don’t trust you at all.”

“I know.” His thumb pets the crease of her thigh, so close to her center—where his tongue was seconds before. So soon after her orgasm, every part of her body still aches with heightened sensitivity. “Doesn’t seem like you have a choice, though, in this kind of situation. Either you keep seeing me as your enemy, and neither of us gets to have much fun, or…” his fingers curve over the apex, finding where her leg connects to her hipbones, “you let yourself trust me, and I make you feel things no human man can.”

Even his pleading request reads like a warning. But he makes a fair argument; she cannot escape this predicament, unless she wants to doom her kingdom to further misery. And he has been—not pleasant, and certainly not kind, but accommodating, somewhat. He has seen the limits of her experience and tried to adjust. At any rate, nothing he’s done so far has pained her just yet, which is much more than what she expects—from men and from monsters.

“So I will bleed when it happens?”

“Yes. You will bleed when it happens.”

“And—and if I ask him to stop? Then what?”

“Oh, never ask a man to stop, sweet girl. That only angers them.”

“Okay,” she agrees.

A ninth tentacle emerges from the fray, joins its brothers and snakes its way up her neck. It taps her lips with its blunt tip, as if—

As if beckoning her to open.

Mona glares at Kunikuzushi. He simply tilts his head in return. “Well?”

“You want me to put that—” she nods her head— “in my mouth?”

“Were you dropped on your head as a child?” he sneers. “I don’t think I can make it more obvious.”

She grumbles, opening her mouth to let the tendril slide between her lips. I have no choice, she tells herself, feeling the cylindrical shape wriggle past her teeth. To his credit, this one is reasonably small, so her jaws need not struggle to take it in. Even so, the sensation of it in her mouth, resting on her tongue, is… unusual. Violating in some ways, thrilling in others. My country, my mother. I have no choice.

“Does it hurt?” he asks, genuine.

Mona shakes her head. 

“Good,” Kunikuzushi says.

The tentacle pushes down her throat and releases a burst of liquid.

Her first instinct is to scream, to thrash hopelessly again even when she knows her resistance amounts to nothing. But then a dreamlike haze invades every corner of her mind, drags her into a content stupor like a soft cotton blanket wrapping around her brain and stifling whatever unpleasant thoughts she might have had about this. About him, the half-man, half-beast sitting on the edge of the bed and watching her with dilated pupils.

Just as he promised, the tension disappears again—this time for good. Her body feels as though it is becoming one with the bedsheets beneath her. She wonders if she should find this kind of control frightening, but then the tentacle shoots more of that liquid inside her, and it tastes like warm tea with powdered sugar. Like summer afternoons in the old hag’s porch, a hot cup in her hands and an open book on her lap. Like home; like Yogyakarta and the bright blue sky. As Mona swallows more of the mysterious substance, her consciousness further fades into that sweet, sleepy trance, but her skin prickles with heightened senses.

The hand on her stomach. The fingers on her thigh. The tendrils holding her arms, her legs, her breasts. Everything is molten, scalding hot, chasing the cold of the sea away with dangerous fire—but she no longer has the will to move. Why would she, when she’s feeling so good?

Something prods at her opening. Not his fingers; she can tell the difference. It is yet another tentacle, slightly larger than the one in her mouth.

“This helps too,” he says. 

The organ sinks in, and she spasms. Her leg twitches, ankles flailing despite the aphrodisiac. 

“None of that,” Kunikuzushi raises her thigh, kisses her knee. “Behave.” 

Mona whimpers.

A second tentacle begins rubbing her clit, and Kunikuzushi chooses her moment of fogginess to move. Slow, experimental thrusts at first, more so to get her used to the penetration, then gradually picking up its pace when Mona succumbs and drops the stiffness of her lower half. Wet squelching sounds follow the tendril as it works in and out. Her dignity withers under each stroke, each obscene gurgle of it forcing its way back into her. Worse, she doesn’t even have the excuse of pain; doesn’t even get to claim it hurts, because when the sting of being stretched open threatens to settle in her nerves, the tentacle on her clit wraps its small form around her nub and starts to suckle gently.

Bliss, quick and dizzying, travels across her abdomen.

“Mmh…” she whines, muffled. “Mmm, m-mmf…”

The… thing, inside her isn’t directionless. It moves with purpose, as if searching for something. Her theory is all the more proven by the twist of Kunikuzushi’s features, the concentration in his eyes as he shifts and changes angles whenever her noises skirt closer to pain than ecstasy. He studies her the way she studies a book, a chart, a diagram; taking note whenever her breath shortens, veering closer as her moans become more high pitched. She is just beginning to wonder the point of his odd little treasure hunt when the tendril strokes a particular spot, and she convulses around him.

Wait, Mona tries to say, but what comes out is garbled mewling.

“Found it,” he laughs.

Wait, wait, wait—

But he doesn’t wait. He thrusts against that spot, quick and feverish, again, again, again. He doesn’t let up, doesn’t ever stop, even starts moving the one in her mouth. And then she is being fucked in two separate holes by nonhuman limbs while their master sits back and observes, looking far too proud of himself. It is humiliating, degrading; even more so when the tentacle on her clit rubs faster, forcing more slick and easing its counterparts’ entry inside her.

“Good girl,” Kunikuzushi skirts his knuckles down her folds, the touch featherlight. “I think you can take one more, can’t you?”

“Mmf,” comes her answer, which more or less reads as: What is wrong with you?

A third tentacle enters, smoother than the first. Together, the two tendrils in her cunt act as fingers, loosening her up and preparing her for what she knows is to come. They work in tandem, perfectly synchronised; when one dives deep, its twin spreads apart in a scissoring motion, leaving her quivering and breathless. If this is only the preparation, then Mona deigns to imagine the real act.

But if she were to pay closer attention—if she were to snap out of her haze and see the beads of sweat trickling down Kunikuzushi’s neck, instead of throwing her gaze at the ceiling and praying to other gods—then she might have noticed that he is just as affected as she is. That everything his limbs feel, he feels as well.

The tightening of her cunt. The damp heat of her mouth. The texture of her tongue, swirling under his appendage. It isn’t a direct comparison, the sensations he gets from his tentacles and his nether regions, but it is close. Close enough that he can fantasise about how it might feel to have her on his cock instead.

Mona, Mona, Mona. Poor, clever Mona. She favors herself invulnerable—the saint of a woman who came to rescue her country, came to offer her soul in exchange for her people’s safety. Nothing in her mind but the stars and the future, so she desperately wants him to think. But the tears pooling in her eyes—green like seafoam, green like jade—tells a different story. He knows how terrified she is; knows when he proposed lovemaking, she saw horror. 

And for the briefest second, she wanted to back out.

If only he were selfless enough to take it slow, though. Alas, just as she isn’t the saint she’d like to be, neither is he. 

He’ll just have to prove her wrong. 

“This feels good, doesn’t it?” he gives her knee another kiss, then her inner thigh. “My own little offering. And to think you were so ready to give up your life when I’m this kind to you.”

She glares at him, or tries to; she doesn’t make it very far before a moan rustles the anger on her face.

He coils a larger tentacle around her waist, then lifts her up so he has a better view of her hole dripping wet just for him. Humankind’s obsession with virginity tends to make fools of them, but he will admit, there is an appeal to knowing he is the first to touch her like this. The first to make that red flush bloom on her cheeks, the first to see her pretty pink cunt opening like an invitation for him to enter. And who is he to question her body’s needs?

“Pretty girl,” he says again, testing a theory.

Her pussy squeezes upon hearing the praise.

What a delight. What a treasure; to know what makes her weak.

Speaking of treasures—

There is still one part of her he hasn’t explored yet.

He gathers her legs and lifts them up too. Her ass comes into view, round and soft and heavy, along with the puckered rim nestled between her cheeks. Kunikuzushi isn’t ashamed to admit he is wholly enthralled by this part of her body, and has had his eyes on it from the very second she climbed onto his bed.

He parts the globes of her ass with his fingers and kisses the hole.

“Mmh!” Mona shrieks, and he can hear her anger through the tentacle gag.

“You don’t want me to indulge?” he asks, playful.

“Mmf,” she says something, then keens, her green eyes fluttering shut.

“How can I understand you like this?” he pouts, planting another kiss as he gropes her flesh. He kisses her again, upwards, closer to her cunt, then kisses where her folds puff with redness. Everything about her is sickeningly sweet—the taste of her, the scent of her. He has always been fascinated by the way human scent changes so easily. Before she smelled of the ocean, and now she smells of sex and arousal. But underneath it all, he detects the fragrance of lavenders and bergamot leaves, and he knows that is who she is. His Mona; his scholar girl, his human, his offering.

Meanwhile, he will always smell of jasmines, and nothing more.

Kunikuzushi calls forth a tentacle—decently sized, neither too big nor small—then uses it to tease her asshole. It pumps more aphrodisiac onto her skin to act as lube, and he has been told the liquid feels warm to swallow, but pleasantly cool to touch. He hears another muffled complaint, but ignores it, stretching open her rear with the help of another pair of tentacles. When he slides the original one in, Mona makes a sound that’s between a sob and a moan, and oh, the things he’d do to keep hearing that sound.

She is blessedly tight. Tighter than her womanhood, than her mouth as she clamps her teeth down on one of his appendages. Even though it is just his tentacle and not his cock, Kunikuzushi can’t stifle the groan that bubbles past his lips.

“Fuck,” he curses. And he doesn’t even will for anything to happen, but then three, four tentacles separate from him and coil around various parts of her—hoarding her, trapping her, preventing her from ever leaving his bed if it wasn’t already impossible before. Greedy, greedy organs. If only he could control them better. 

“M—mmh,” Mona cries at the sudden onslaught.

He crooks the tendril in her rear, loosening her the same way he means to loosen her womanhood. Back and forth, a gentle rhythm, something sweet for the woman who didn’t even know sex should be pleasurable before meeting him. He doesn’t forget to give a few more spurts of aphrodisiac to keep her calm, both in her mouth and on her skin, and that is yet another point of fascination for him. The dose he’s given so far would be enough to lobotomise superior beings, yet Mona remains as petulant as ever, kicking her legs, squirming at any slight stimulation.

“You’re a difficult one, aren’t you?” he removes his necklaces. “You were smart to run away. The keraton wouldn’t have suited you at all. You’d get yourself killed the first week there.”

She is close. He can sense it just as he senses his own lust building to the surface. His cock is so hard that it hurts, but if he rushes this, he might never land another chance. Setting his jewels to the side, he grazes a knuckle down her pussy, where his tentacles are diligently taking turns thrusting in and out. 

“Nn—mmm, mmf…” suddenly, Mona shakes her head and pulls her hips—or tries to, at least, rocking back towards the mattress in hopes his tendrils could no longer reach where she is weak. A flicker of panic rises within him, and he wonders if he’s hurting her, if he should retract a few of his tentacles—

And then she comes for a second time, shameful tears streaming down her face. The source of her shame becomes evident when she squirts colourless liquid over his appendages, onto his chest, shudders wracking through her body as her back arches in pleasure. Even her moan comes out shattered, repressed, as if she tried her best to keep it down only for her own body to betray her. 

Something stirs in Kunikuzushi’s chest.

If I can’t have her, he thinks, strangely calm, I will level the Dutch East Indies with a storm it has never seen.

The tentacle in Mona’s mouth leaves with a wet pop, but the ones in her pussy and ass stay there, unmoving. Even unmoving, it is still too much for her. She has barely recovered from her second orgasm, and already she knows it was far more intense than her first. What even was that, the burst of liquid that came from inside her? She doesn’t know for certain, but it feels sinful. Feels like the kind of thing that shouldn’t happen, when one is being ravished by a tentacled monster.

She is lowered back to the featherbed, and not even a second after her spine meets the mattress, Kunikuzushi is hovering on top of her. He has removed his necklaces, so that means—that means whatever comes next is the real thing. The part where a man takes a woman in the marital chambers, or in the back alley of a Dutch fortress if you’re a green-eyed soldier with a revolver.

“Wait,” Mona begs. “Wait, please, please.”

She does not expect him to wait. He has proven himself incapable of that, and this isn’t something men can wait for, anyway. She expects him to gouge her out until she bleeds—like most men do with their wives, like the Sultan would have done to her, like her Dutchman father did with her mother.

To her confusion, he waits.

“I promised it wouldn’t hurt,” he reminds gently. “I haven’t broken my promise so far, have I?”

“N-no,” she stammers. “But you will now.”

He laughs, but unlike before, there is no edge of mockery to it. “How do you know that? Can you see the future?”

“No, but—” she looks to her side, beyond the bedroom. She can see his throne, the piles of treasure, and a glimmer of moonlight that signals the entrance. Too far, too far—an impossible distance to cross with wobbly legs and a beast on her tail. “But I know what happens next. So you owe me the truth.”

“The truth,” he echoes. 

The organs binding her wrists retreat. She is freed, but her arms ache from being held this way and that. They flop to the bed unceremoniously, where he then slides his palms over hers and entwines their fingers together. The gesture feels almost romantic.

“The truth is,” Kunikuzushi kisses her nose, “I can’t take care of you if you won’t let me.”

That is—odd. That is an odd way to refer to the act. Mona has heard every variation; to be tasted, to be deflowered, to be fucked, to be overpowered. That last one is the most ridiculous; digagahi, as if it is some kind of valiant battle on the man’s part. But she has never heard it described as to be taken care of.

He nuzzles her forehead in a very cat-like manner. The look in his eyes is desperate, almost beseeching. “Please,” he whispers. 

Groveling. He is groveling.

Mona realises, then, that Kunikuzushi is nowhere near as ancient as she assumed. Immortal or otherwise, he is a youth on the cusp of manhood—perhaps younger than her, even. Inexperienced, too; not in matters of the body, but matters of the heart.

“Keep your promise,” she mumbles, bracing herself. The tentacles on her chest and between her legs pull back slowly, and she sighs, her cunt clenching at the loss.

“I will,” he promises, and there it is again, that boyish part of him. The eagerness, the excitement. 

She looks down just as he discards his cloth, and blanches. For a moment, there is the ripple effect again, the mirage that blurs her eyes and muddles her perception, but then she refocuses and glimpses—that. A hard, throbbing erection, thicker than any of the tendrils he has used so far, blackened near the tip like his fingers. Small ridges and bumps line the underside of his cock, a revelation that makes her insides tingle not unpleasantly. Heavy drops of pre-cum have gathered at its cockhead, and that is the last she sees of it before he positions himself to her opening.

Mona holds her breath.

“Don’t do that,” Kunikuzushi scolds, not unkindly. “Just breathe. Keep your pretty eyes on me, and just breathe.” 

Pretty eyes.

Empty, meaningless words from someone who will never know the weight of having those eyes.

Regardless, she stares at his face and lets her lungs take in air.

Kunikuzushi doesn’t tease, but neither does he rush in carelessly. He breaches her open with a slow roll of his hips, and Mona feels the agonising, mind-melting drag of his textured cock entering inch by inch. It almost hurts, and then it does. When the ache of being pried open returns tenfold, he grinds into that sweet spot inside of her again, sheathing himself completely at an angle that makes her toes curl.

“Oh,” she sighs.

He kisses her, chaste and sweet. “Doesn’t hurt at all, does it?”

She huffs. She refuses to give him the last word.

She can achieve no victory like this, though. The odds are against her. He pulls out, letting the ridges of his cock rub her inner walls, and that is all it takes to render her heaving and flustered beneath him. But even that isn’t enough; he seeks more of her embarrassment when he drives in harder, harder than the first thrust, as if punishing her for her silence.

“You say nothing,” Kunikuzushi notes, a tentacle flicking her hips, “but this tells me everything.”

“No,” Mona shakes her head. She doesn’t want to make it easy. He has enjoyed too much of easy, with victims that never fight back and treasures he reaps in the bloody aftermath. Her vision blurs, her chest hyperventilates, but still she squabbles as his erection and his aphrodisiac both threaten to overtake her. “No, I—this isn’t—ah, this isn’t fair—”

His brows furrow, and there is something so familiar about that glimpse of childish frustration. She has half a mind to ask—

Before he buries himself deep, and her mind splinters. He’s filling her properly now, the shape of him carving a space inside her, subduing her, ruining her, breaking her just so that she entertains horrible fantasies of his cock kissing her womb. No, no, no, she thinks deliriously, then makes the mistake of looking at her abdomen where she feels a sly tendril rubbing under her bellybutton. She soon finds what he wants her to see; the outline of his length forming a bulge from base to tip.

She whines. The sound is pathetic, but there is little she can do to force it down. 

“Too big,” she mewls.

“You’re the one who’s too small,” Kunikuzushi croons. He traces the bulge, admiring. “If I pushed in just a little deeper, you’d fall apart and pass out before I feel a thing.” As though to demonstrate, he nudges in a touch further. “But I can, if I want. I can go as deep as I’d like. Could you stop me?” he sneers. “Would you stop me?”

“I would,” she chokes out. The twin tentacles on her breasts are back to torturing her, their perverse groping making it that much harder for her to believe they’re not under his control. “I w-would—ah, wouldn’t—hnn, wouldn’t let you—”

“I find that hard to believe,” he says, unsympathetic. 

And then he indulges.

Kunikuzushi slams in completely, stopping only when he is buried to the hilt. Mona has all but a second to prepare before he starts pounding with rough, brutal strokes, her soft body rippling under the force of his thrusts. As she screams for the greater ocean to hear, she almost wishes for the barest twitch of pain, for in the absence of agony there is only bliss; numbing, exhilarating, a silent enemy chipping at the last strings of her sanity. She clings to what little coherency she has left, but the monster doesn’t relent. The monster murmurs sweet nothings to her; the monster plunges in fervent enough for his balls to smack against her clit. Never one without the other, that gentleness, that hard edge. 

And through it all, green. The green glow of emeralds, the green silk discarded beside the bed. Green, always, always green.

“God,” Mona prays. “God—oh, oh my—god, please, please—”

“Which one?” he asks. He sounds truly inquisitive, even as he fucks her fast and sloppy down below. 

“The—ah, the one Y-Yogya—ahn, Yogyakarta worships,” her voice is warbled. “It—haah, it—the one that’s o-on the official seal, and—and—and the prayers—”

“Oh,” he nips her jaw, bucking inside her. “That one. He can’t hear you here. You cut yourself off the moment you entered my cave.”

“But—” is the only syllable that makes it past her tongue before she dissolves into a fit of gasps. Her protests wouldn’t matter, anyway; not when she can scarcely hear herself over the lewd noises of skin slapping against skin, of laboured breathing and broken, tearful moans. How can she expect a god she’s never worshipped to come rescue her when even she is barred from her own thoughts?

I’m beyond saving, Mona thinks sullenly, and then she doesn’t think at all. She can’t think, between the constant battering of his tip against her weak points and the pinch of his organs on her bruising nipples. There is no reprieve; he sinks in with ridiculous ease, entry facilitated by her sopping wetness as he nails her down to the featherbed with his weight. She feels like a plaything made for him to throw around and fuck as he likes, but don’t all married women feel that way? At least she gets pleasure out of it. At least she comes and comes and comes, until there is nothing left inside her but ecstasy.

Still, wrecked as she is, he doesn’t seem satisfied. She sees it in the set of his jaw, the shift of his tentacles as they unfurl around him like black wings. The small ones twitch and wriggle constantly, restless, while the larger ones point their ends to her as if watching her being ravaged by their source.

Mona closes her eyes, hoping to evade their gaze.

Kunikuzushi doesn’t hesitate to show he won’t tolerate that. He spreads her thighs apart, wider than before, the limbs pulling her legs to her chest and folding her in half. If Mona were any less flexible than she is, she might have snapped a bone or two. Fortunately—or unfortunately—those nights climbing onto rooftops have done her justice, so she’s pliant and open like a flattened book for his unobstructed view.

“What—ah,” she yelps, tears building in her eyes again, “what are you—what are you doing?”

“I prefer this,” he says. “I can see you better.”

“I d-don’t want—haah,” Mona manages, “I don’t want t-to—ahn, d-don’t want to see you…”

“But you’re taking me so well,” Kunikuzushi rams in at an angle that makes her see stars. “See? You’re sucking me in, squeezing me, wrapping your legs around me like you can’t bear for me to pull out.” He licks a teardrop that’s made its way down her cheek. “No need to worry. I won’t pull out anytime soon. Not until I have what I want.”

What he wants—a peculiar phrase. By that, she assumes everything she mentioned earlier, the worship and the acolytes and the respect that his mother has. What, then, does that have to do with fucking her stupid? There is no part of his grand ambitions that would require rendering her into a blabbering, drooling fool, yet here she is.

“I’m not—I’m n—ngh…” she struggles, latching onto the single flaw in his argument, “I’m not wrapping m-my legs—ah, my legs around—oh, around you…”

As if on cue, the tentacles hook her ankles over his shoulders, her ass to the air.

Oh, fuck y—

From the periphery of her vision, one appendage rises above the rest. A closer look reveals it is an almost identical copy of Kunikuzushi’s cock, its veiny length ribbed with a similar pattern, its tip flaring to a round edge. It even shares the same weight, the same distinct thickness, and when it disappears behind him and pokes between her thighs, Mona has no doubt what he intends to use it for.

“I can’t,” she cries out, closing her legs—forgetting that she is being forced apart by an army of tendrils, forgetting he has her ankles coiled around his neck. 

“You can,” he parrots, mocking. “And you did, just earlier. I could feel you. Your ass was clenching on me so tight, I could hardly breathe.”

“You don’t n-need to—ah, to breathe,” she slurs. He doesn’t even have the decency to slow down as they have this conversation, tossing back and forth insults like he isn’t claiming her maidenhood in the filthiest way possible. Like he hasn’t taken what is meant to be sacred and turned it into something perverse. “You—you—K-Kuni, it wouldn’t fit—”

“I’ve loosened you enough,” he dismisses.

Whether or not that’s true, it doesn’t change the fact that what he’s put her through has corrupted her body, her mind, if not her soul. Even now, with only one massive cock spearing her cunt, she feels her strength dwindling at every wet thrust inside her. Where she thrashed and squirmed before, now she only has enough energy to keep her head raised as Kunikuzushi hollows out her insides. She might have said something then, something like, Yes, yes, give me, please, or something like, No, I can’t, that’s too much. There is no way of telling which sentence actually leaves her mouth.

Whatever it is, his response is, “You loved it, having both of your holes filled up at the same time. It wouldn’t be generous of me, if I didn’t let you experience it again.”

“You—are—not—generous,” she grits, hissing.

Kunikuzushi raises an eyebrow. “Aren’t I?”

He offers no further explanation to the vague statement before sliding the tentacle into her ass. The intrusion proves more difficult than penetrating her cunt had been, ridges snagging at her rim and sending electrifying shocks through her body as he forces inwards with a ragged push. But he means what he says about the effort he has spared into preparing her; with the help of his aphrodisiac, it isn’t long until he’s finally stuffing her to the brim, bottoming out inside her rear with a languid groan.

Mona shrieks, but what comes out is a silent scream. She is breaking, evaporating, and so, so full. Overwhelmed in every sense of the word. He’s pressed flush against her, his chest to hers, his tentacles all over her sweat-slicked skin. She doesn’t even realise she’s neglected sniffling and jumped straight into weeping until he kisses her forehead, murmuring a soft, “I have you. I have you, it’s alright. I don’t intend for you to feel anything but pleasure.” 

“Kuni,” she exhales. 

There’s a ghost of an expression on his face whenever she moans that name. She can’t place that look for certain, but it reminds her of stray dogs when someone pets their head; a lonely, abandoned animal experiencing newfound affection. It endears him to her, briefly, but then the cock in her ass starts moving to the same unforgiving rhythm as the one in her cunt, and she’s reminded of who she is again.

“Messy,” he scolds, slants his lips over the corners of her eyes and drinks her tears. She is never empty, not even for a moment, and he makes sure of it. When he slides out from her core, the tentacle-cock snaps deeper into her ass. On and on he beats her down like this, a neverending assault of sensations, all the while his leering eyes rove over her as if it’s her fault she is leaking slick everywhere. “So sensitive. I didn’t know human women were this weak. Are your men that awful at pleasing you?”

“W-wouldn’t—ah, wouldn’t know,” Mona shakes her head. “Wouldn’t—I’ve never—oh my god, I’ve never—”

“Ah, true. I’m the first who’s ever had you,” he hums.

When he bends down, the cords of his muscle contract. Mona is transfixed. “Let me tell you an unfortunate secret,” he says, as if to impart divine wisdom. “Wherever you run off to, you’re never going to find someone who will fuck you like this.”

“Good,” she spits out, straining. The nerve of him. “I don’t—ah, I don’t need you…”

“You think so now, but you’ll crave me when the time comes.” She wants to say it is overconfidence, but he has made her come twice, and she is close to her third. So she keeps her mouth shut—gods know the lip of hers has embarrassed her enough already. She feels it approaching, that third orgasm, feels it descending closer like a rising tide—

And then Kunikuzushi touches her stomach, doesn’t even press down. “Come for me,” he says.

She does. Somehow, she does. She comes instantly, furiously, squirting that clear liquid again. There is no more resistance; her body hangs limp, lethargic, every bit the doll she would have become if she’d joined the keraton’s harem. So lost is she in the sea of her own rapture that she doesn’t even think of how odd it is, how she climaxed at his command. Doesn’t see the bright red flags, the changes in her own body.

Doesn’t notice the smell of jasmines growing stronger, and it’s not just coming from Kunikuzushi anymore.

He’s still pistoning inside her, of course. That has never stopped. Just because her consciousness is drifting to the ether, doesn’t mean he’s selfless enough to withhold chasing after his own high. When her lashes flutter with exhaustion, he bites down on her neck and shoves inside, sends a tentacle to grind on her clit so she’ll have no choice but to stay awake. He can’t have her tuckered out just yet; he’s determined to keep those enchanting green eyes staring at him for as long as he’s able. As long as he’s making love to her, as long as he has her, as long as he lives.

You’re not going to find anything if you just sit around like that. Come with me, I can help you.

Sharp, unpleasant, and prickly as a land fruit. How lucky is he, to be the only person in the world who has earned her submission. It has taken half his tentacles and an ungodly dosage of aphrodisiac, but he has it, and that is what matters to him. Noble, heroic Mona; splayed beneath him and completely unmoving. No quick jabs or witty quips coming from her mouth, just lustful moans and the occasional sob that speaks of an overstimulated body. Crying, sniffling, eyes glazed over after the fourth, fifth orgasm he wrangles out of her. He could free her from his tendrils, and she wouldn’t even try to crook a finger, he thinks. That’s how lost she is.

“Beautiful,” he whispers, worshipping. “Your eyes are beautiful.”

Her lower lip quivers. She looks—

Heartbroken.

No, no, no. That’s not what he wants. He has said something wrong, but he can’t figure out what’s so bad about telling her the truth—

“They’re not,” she sniffles, then keens. Comes down from one climax, only for Kunikuzushi to drag her into another one. “They’re h—haah, they’re horrible, I’m h-horrible—”

“No, please,” he finds himself pleading. Begging for scraps of her vulnerability like a withered anemone as he builds her up, breaks her down, a repeated cycle. He fucks her as a man would, but fawns over her with the neediness of a boy. “Your eyes are beautiful. Your mind is beautiful. You’re—” beautiful, but the words clog in his tongue. You’re beautiful, and you’re mine. Forget your country. Come be with me. Come rule with me in the ocean over my mother’s corpse.

She shakes her head, frantic. This, too, is reserved for him only. He didn’t think to track every facet of her life after their first meeting, but he knows her, knows she is not the type to let other people see her cry. She wouldn’t have come here if she is. “You h-have no—ah, no idea, you don’t k-know—”

“I do know,” he says. “I do know. You’ve always been beautiful.”

Finally, finally—recognition lights in her eyes.

“K—Kuni?”

He sweeps forward and kisses her. And Mona—

Mona kisses back without hesitation.

Kunikuzushi’s composure ends there. Shuddering, he collapses on top of her and pumps white-hot semen into her cunt, filling her, tainting her, binding her to him and his spirit realm. The viscous liquid overflows and trickles between her thighs even when he’s still plugging her hole, even when she clenches around him in the telltale signs of her own orgasm. She’s spasming beneath him, eyes rolled back in elation, her still-mortal body incapable of handling his full attention just yet. Thinking to push her to greater heights, he mimics the sensation of breeding her womb by spilling a stream of aphrodisiac inside her ass, the tentacle trembling just as he does.

“Oh my god,” she moans those words again.

He frowns. He’ll have to fuck that out of her before the night ends. 

He pulls out of her, feeling a twinge of arousal run through his softening cock at the sight of her entrance gaping with emptiness. Cum gushes out in lewd spurts, staining the bedsheets, but he doesn’t mind. He has a treasure trove of silks for replacement, anyway. Her asshole is met with the same fate when he withdraws the large tentacle, remnants of unsoaked aphrodisiac mixing in with his spend. Not that there is much of a distinction, anyway; they’re almost the same shade, with the aphrodisiac taking on a more pearlescent sheen. 

He reigns in the rest of his limbs back, too. She has had more than enough of that, he thinks. He’ll make love to her without them for the rest of the night. Just as before, he assumes that she’ll merely fall limp on the bed upon freedom, but—

But, to her surprise, two small hands reach to cup his cheek.

Kunikuzushi freezes.

This is a fluke, surely. Blessings like this don’t come to him so easily. He has to take it with his bear hands, hoard it as he hoards treasure, hoards everything green.

But Mona’s palms stay there. They’re so soft; the softest things he has ever felt. Callused from years of hardwork under the sun, but still soft, somehow.

“Kuni,” she coos. 

She might have said something else, then. Or she would have, if he’d permitted her to keep talking. But the tender, unmistakably doting touch triggers Kunikuzushi and his tentacles into a mindless, hungry frenzy, so he has no choice but to seize her by the waist and flip her into a new position. 

*

The ocean is vast for an eight-year-old demit, but somehow, the land is even more frightening.

He doesn’t understand the land-dwellers’ lifestyle. How can they go where they want, if they don’t have the current to move them along? How can they stand upright, if a slight push of air is all it takes to send them toppling over? How can they pluck those fruits they like, if they can’t count on the water to propel them upwards? He has only spent no more than three minutes fumbling on the sands of Parangtritis, and already, he hates everything the beach has to offer. 

Deciding he deserves a break, he crawls back to the waves, tripping over his own tentacles every few steps. He curses everything; curses the heat of the sun shining on his skin, curses the sand that’s wormed its way inside his mouth, his nose, and even between the strands of his hair.

He wants nothing more than to swim back home, to the complex at the very edge of his mother’s kingdom that she built for him from the moment she saw what he looked like. She can’t have him near her court, no, no; he’s too much of an abomination for that. And she certainly can’t have him near her rotating circle of beautiful women. So the uncharted corners of her domain it is.

But if he swims back—

If he swims back empty-handed with no treasures in hand, she will never stop seeing him as anything other than a mistake. She will never give him a name.

So here he stands, struggling, sweating. Though the earth of man is not kind to him, he’s determined to find something of worth. He just… needs the water for a moment. 

When the waves rush to greet him, he sighs in relief, basking in the coldness. He spreads his arms out in a wide arc, feeling the gentle current under his fingertips.

He makes it as far as the sea reaches his chest when he hears a feminine voice cry out: “Are you insane?”

That is the only warning he receives before a pair of arms wrap around his stomach, and suddenly, he’s being dragged by a mysterious poacher behind him. He panics, thrashing around, his tentacles whacking the figure behind him, but nothing he does breaks him free; not even as he screams and screams, demanding the ocean come to his assistance. 

All he gets is a fish swimming by. Forgive me, your highness, the small threadfin says before wriggling away.

The arms only let go of him once he is back on the cursed land. “Are you insane?” the same voice repeats, frantic. “Don’t you know you’re not supposed to swim at these hours? The tide is high, and the waves could get you; you’re lucky I dragged you out before—”

She stops. 

He comes face to face with the mysterious poacher: a human girl who looks about his age, maybe a year or two older than him. She has dark hair that cascades down her shoulders, pulled into twintails, but what catches his attention the most are her eyes. Brilliant gemstones the colour of sunkissed seafoam, a pale green that almost grows silver under the dying afternoon light. He doesn’t think he has seen anything in his mother’s kingdom nearly as beautiful.

I found it, he thinks. He’s found what he intends to bring back to his mother.

But then he finds the reason she stops, follows the line of her sight as she squints at his lower half, and shame curdles inside him. Shame and embarrassment and anger.

“I didn’t need your help,” he hisses, hiding his tentacles with a sidesweep of his cloth. That does nothing, of course; there is too many of them for one small cloth to hide. “I was perfectly fine. I wanted to be in the water, you idiot—”

“But you’ll drown,” she exclaims.

He blinks. Is she blind? He’s fairly certain she isn’t, which means she can see his tentacles. For some reason, she hasn’t said anything about it though.

“I can’t drown,” he grits his teeth. “I live in the ocean. I’m not a weak human like you.”

“I gathered,” the girl bites back. “I was only worried. I couldn’t see your… things, in the water, so I thought you’d drown like I would if the sea dragged you away.” Then she huffs, “No need to be so rude about it.”

“If you thought I’d drown like you would, why’d you come save me?” he grumbles, sitting up and wiping the grime from his body. More sand. He doesn’t remember the sand at the bottom of the ocean being this annoying.

She gives him an incredulous look. “You’d die otherwise,” she says, as if his death—a random person she’s never met until this day, a random person who’s not even the same species as her—is enough of a reason for her to risk her life. “Or I thought you would, at least…”

“Idiot,” he says again. “I’m a monster. You don’t just run around saving monsters.”

“I very well could if I wanted,” the girl scowls. “But lesson learned. I won’t run around saving rude, ungrateful boys next time.”

“Wha—ungrateful? How can I be ungrateful for something I didn’t even want?”

“It’s about the effort, not the action itself.”

“It was a stupid action, that’s what it was.”

“Why are you even here, anyway?” the girl points to the ocean. “If you live all the way out there, what’d you come here for?”

He hesitates. How much should he tell her? Would it be pathetic of him to confide his troubles in a mere human? Would his mother be cross with him for speaking of her behind her back? Would she even understand the gravity of what he needs to do? It’s not as if he can say, I want to bring something valuable for my mother, and I’ve decided you’re the best I can find. Can you walk with me to the water and hold your breath while I drag you under? I don’t know how this works.

“I came to find a pretty thing for my mother,” he decides to answer.

Her brows quirk. “Like a gift?”

“Something like that,” he agrees. “It must be green, and it must be the most precious thing I can find.”

“Why green?”

“My mother likes green.”

She looks like she’s about to ask the question to end all questions. 

Is your mother—

“What’s your name?” she surprises him with something else instead.

He stares at her. “I don’t have one.”

“What do you mean, you don’t have one?” she scoots closer. She doesn’t seem disgusted by the tentacles. Doesn’t seem to be disgusted with him at all, actually—though she does nothing to hide her irritation. “Everyone has a name.”

“Everyone but me,” he seethes. 

“I have to call you something,” she says.

“You don’t have to call me anything,” he sulks. “I’m leaving. I won’t find anything of use in this ugly beach.”

She seems the curious sort, and he hoped to lure her into the ocean by feigning his departure, but she surprises him again when she stands up and says, “You’re not going to find anything if you just sit around like that.” She stretches out her hand for him to hold, “Come with me. I can help you.”

Baffled, he takes her hand. 

“Why are you here?” he flips the question she asked him before. He is stumbling through the sand again, but with his hand in hers, he finds that he walks easier—if only because her sturdy figure is there to function as a cane. “Humans are usually inside at this hour.”

“I’m not supposed to be out,” she says, bringing a finger to her mouth, “but I like this time of the day. Everything’s prettier when the sun is setting, and when the sky starts turning dark, I get to see the first stars popping up in the night.” He nearly falls over as his tentacles bump against a log, but she is quick to steady him. “My mother says this is the hour where all the demit start to come out. I guess she was right—but you don’t seem all that scary.”

“I can be scary,” he retorts, offended. He raises a few tentacles and aims them towards her, making himself look bigger than he is.

“You’re ugly, not scary,” the girl snorts, swatting one of the tentacles. “If you won’t give me something to call you by, I’ll just come up with my own.” 

“I told you to not call me anything.”

“Octopus boy,” she tries.

“Clever,” he gripes, sarcastic.

She hums. “Squid boy?”

“Creative.”

“Oh,” she snaps her fingers, then pokes his tummy unprovoked. “Fat boy.” 

He yanks his hand back. “You’re not going to help me,” he accuses, fuming. “You’re just dragging me along so you can make fun of me.”

She giggles, and that is… something. His stomach flutters in a way he doesn’t like. “I do plan to help you,” she affirms, then gestures behind her—at the wall of trees that separate the beach from human civilisation. She points up, “The fruits of this tree are green.”

“I’m not going to bring back fruits for my mother,” he says derisively.

“Not just any fruit. We’ll find the tallest tree and we’ll pick the largest fruit.”

“That doesn’t make it any better. My mother’s used to jewels and silk.” And pretty girls, he almost adds. This year’s sacrifice came and went; a curly-haired native girl of twenty-something years, proficient in music. Sometimes he sees her playing with the minnows in the main palace garden, when she isn’t in his mother’s chambers. “Special fruits aren’t going to be enough to impress her.”

The girl rolls her eyes. “If you have a better idea…”

He does, actually. It involves her losing her consciousness so it would be easier for him to haul her over his back and swim home. A plan starts to form in his head, then; he’ll go along with this farce of special fruits and tall trees, and then, when she’s at the top of the tree—because he is certainly not going to be doing the climbing—he’ll shake the branch until she falls over and passes out. Then he’ll carry her home.

I’m very clever, he tells himself.

After an hour of searching the coastline, they come across what they both agree is the tallest tree on the beach. It towers over its surroundings, its growth abnormal and slightly deformed, but he spots ripe fruits even from his vantage point on the ground, so he supposes it will do. The steeper the branches, the bigger the odds she’ll knock her head when she falls, anyway.

“I expect a sincere thank-you after,” says the girl.

He scoffs.

She starts climbing, then, and to her credit, she is a very good climber. Something about the way she moves makes it clear she has a habit of clambering onto rooftops and holdfasts. Within a few minutes, she’s at the very top. She reaches forward and plucks the biggest fruits, then calls for him. “Catch,” she intones. 

She doesn’t even wait for him to prepare before dropping the fruits over his head. He only manages to catch one; two of them hit his head, and the last fruit lands on the sand. He shouts curses at her. She laughs merrily. Like the beauty of her eyes, her laughter bewitches him.

“I do you a great favour, and this is how you repay me,” the girl mocks, still holding onto a branch. She is leaning against the tree, knee crooked at a crevice in the bark, lounging there as if it is the most comfortable spot in the world.

He’s about to let out another stream of curses when a gust of wind blows, mussing her hair, and the sunset’s orange light shines upon her. Though his kind doesn’t breathe as humans do, in that moment, he finally understands the meaning behind the phrase breathtaking. And he swears, just for a few brief, magical seconds, he sees golden fire flickering across those haunting green eyes. 

He realises, then, that he doesn’t want to bring her as an offering to his mother. If she were to be anyone’s offering, it should be him. She is his and his alone.

In the future, he’ll curse himself for neglecting to ask her name, and then he’ll curse himself for not following her home and marking where she lives. Because she won’t remember him; of course she won’t. 

The ocean has a way of making people forget. 

*

In Mona’s dreams, she is fourteen years old. 

A beach unfurls before her, and on that beach is a boy. He is strange and inhuman, smelling of jasmines, but she knows he means her no harm. 

“You’ve grown taller,” the boy gives her a once-over look, eyes squinting. 

“You’ve grown thin,” she says once she remembers who he is.

She runs across the white sand with the boy’s fingers in hand. She builds a castle of fragile gravel while the boy digs a moat around it. She throws a clump of dirt at the boy’s face as he chucks pebbles in her direction. Sometimes they are shouting, other times they are laughing together, and when the sun has finished setting and the sky turns dark, he bids her a reluctant farewell. Tells her he hated every second spent in her presence, looks back at her when he dives under the waves.

Wait, the fourteen-year-old version of her almost calls out. Wait, you haven’t told me your—

Mona wakes.

She wakes to a soft, clean bed, her body scrubbed of seasalt and… other things. The clothes she wore to the cave are missing, and instead she is dressed in flowery cinde silk tied to a firm knot behind her back. Curious, she touches the fabric. The cloth is so smooth that it seems to run through her fingers like water, red and green splashes of colour forming blooming jasmines, and she wonders if this is the most expensive thing she has ever worn. It very well could be, though it is also very likely to have been stolen from a shipwreck. 

She feels like she’s wearing blood.

“You slept soundly,” comes Kunikuzushi’s voice from the edge of the bed.

She turns, and there he is. He’s facing the other direction, setting something that looks like a plate on a small wooden bedside table embedded into the stone walls.

The memories come rushing to her; of climbing a tree for him when she was ten, of encountering him again when she was fourteen. Of kneeling before him, of crying underneath him, of being fucked by his cock and his mass of tentacles that couldn’t seem to get enough of her. Instead of revealing their shared past, he chose to keep her in the dark, and in doing so humiliated her more than she is willing to admit.

So she does the smart thing.

She grabs a pillow and whacks him over the head with it.

“Wha—ow!” he exclaims, retaliating by doing the very same thing. The pillow hits her sides, albeit with much less force than she used on him, which somehow irritates her further. “Why the sudden rage?” 

“You knew me!” she shouts, whacking him again. “You knew me, and you didn’t tell me. You let me get on my knees and offer my body to you like some kind of—of—”

“How—how is that my fault?” he folds his arms. “You forget you ever met me, and I’m the one to blame?”

“You could have said something!” another pillow. “You could have reminded me!” another pillow. “You could have—you could have dropped hints, if appearing as frightening and mysterious is that important to you,” another pillow to face, to the chest, to the groin. “Horrible, horrible, horrible man—”

“Ow, ow, ow,” he laughs, matching each strike to mock her.

“Do you know—do you know how much work I put into this?” Mona lunges at him, intending to claw his face off, but he catches her and pulls her into his arms before she gets the chance to maul him. “The time I spent researching you, choosing the right day and date to come see you, when all along you were the rude fat boy I met when I was ten—”

“I wasn’t rude,” he argues. “You dragged me out of the water—”

“Because I thought I was saving you,” she settles for rapping her knuckles against his forehead. The tentacles shrink as she yells, as if her raised voice is all it takes to frighten them when it was only hours ago that they were rearranging her insides. Mona reaches to grab one, thinking to throttle it with her bare hands—

When a stab of pain shoots up her leg, her ligament stretched beyond its capacity, and she stumbles face-first against Kunikuzushi’s chest. The brief ache seems to be a trigger for the rest of her body’s reactions, as a sudden soreness overtakes every functioning limb until she is left groaning and whimpering just as badly as when she was being fucked by the man embracing her now.

“Alright, no more of that,” he cackles, placing her back on the bed. “Clearly, you’re no stronger than you were at age eight, so you should save your energy and refrain from attacking me anytime soon. Here,” he serves the plate she saw earlier and a glass of dark liquid. He smirks, condescending, “For your troubles.”

On the plate is a cluster of palm sugar cakes bundled in green riceflour paste, dusted with just a perfect amount of grated coconut. The sight of it makes her mouth water immediately, and she realises she hasn’t had anything to eat since leaving her home. “Is this poisoned?” she asks, squinting her eyes and stuffing one into her mouth.

“What kind of idiot asks if something is poisoned while eating it?” 

Mona dismisses the admittedly reasonable question and gorges on the plate. She doesn’t even ask if he wants any, doesn’t think to share until the ceramic has been cleaned of its contents with just one cake remaining. She swallows that last piece down her throat, too, then reaches for the drink.

“Drink slowly,” he admonishes, retracting his hand. He has spent the better part of the past few minutes wordlessly watching her eat, though it’s not as if she cares for how he wastes his time. It is only when she finishes chewing the leftover paste that he places the drink in her hands. 

The dark liquid turns out to be tea. Jasmine tea, from the taste of it—but overly sweetened. And she does have a fondness for sweets, yet even she thinks this is too much.

“You put too much sugar in this,” she complains, sticking her tongue out. 

Triumph flits across his eyes.

“What?” she pesters, annoyed.

“Nothing,” he says. Then, after a comfortable silence, he asks, “Why do you hate green?”

“I don’t hate green,” she huffs, taking another sip. Something about his vagueness raises suspicion… “Weren’t you upset with me for making assumptions about you? You’re doing the same thing now.”

“Being accused of hating a colour and being accused of eating people are vastly different,” he says dryly. “And it’s not as if my assumption’s coming from nowhere. Every time I point out your green eyes, your mood changes for the worse.”

“Being around you isn’t good for anyone’s mood.”

“You know what I meant,” a tentacle flicks her knee.

“I don’t hate green,” Mona repeats, weighing her options. There doesn’t seem to be any harm in sharing a secret or two. Come morning, she will depart from this cave the second her legs have recovered, and she will never have to see him again. She will sail across the ocean with her mother, gold in hand, and…

Build a new life, she tells herself. Study the stars. Be a scholar.

Surely, there exists a place in this endless world where someone like her—a woman of unremarkable birth—can pursue scholarly ambitions.

(Even as the idea begins to form in her mind, doubt creeps in.)

“My father is Dutch,” she confesses, and leaves it at that.

Understanding passes between them. “Oh,” he says.

“Mm.” She taps her fingers on the glass, restless. “Every time I’m reminded of my eyes, I think of him. He gave me this.”

“Yes,” Kunikuzushi drones, tendrils flaring, “he gave you that the same way my mother gave me these, I’m sure.” 

She gathers her knees to her chest, frowning. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“Only that you’re a fool to let your father dictate how you feel about your eyes,” he waves his hand. “Creation is nothing more than a game of chance, I’ve learned—for humans and demit alike. Sometimes you look just like your creator, and sometimes you look nothing like them. But it’s only something that affects if you if you let it.” He curls one tentacle over his palm, “I’ve decided not to fall down that road. My mother has her kingdom and your kingdom both. She won’t have me as well.”

Mona can’t help it. She grins. “Does this mean you’re not picking special fruits for her anymore?”

“I’ve long outgrown that,” he snaps. “She can take her fruits to hell.”

His mother and her father both. She has never met the man, yet she cannot think of anyone she despises more than him. In her nightmares, he takes on the appearance a gaunt, faceless figure, with the only mark of his personhood being the green of his irises. The green that she inherited; the green that, if Kunikuzushi’s words are of any worth, have nothing to do with whatever part of him has been left inside her. Merely an unlucky draw in the game of probability—a harmless condition, not a symptom of a larger disease. 

She has never told anyone how she feels about her eyes. Not her friends, not the old hag, certainly not her mother. How odd, that the first person to hear the conflict of her is someone facing the opposite problem. Has Kunikuzushi ever spent lonely nights wishing to resemble his goddess mother, the same way Mona has prayed to be rid of her father’s likeness? Has he ever stared at the lower half of his body and imagined something else, the same way she has often stared at the mirror and pictured brown eyes instead of green?

Or blue, she thinks, sneaking glances at Kunikuzushi. While she deigns to stare too long, he seems to hold no qualms about fixating his gaze on her. Blue is pretty, too.

“I have another offer,” he says softly, “if your green eyes bother you so much.”

Mona inches closer. 

“Use them for me,” he leans beside her. “I’ve made it no secret that I want what my mother has. With you by my side, I could finally rise within her kingdom.” There is a dark haze in his eyes that wasn’t there before, even when he was playing into the role of a man-eating sea monster. “And then, once I’m close enough to stand by her side, I could kill her. Drive a blade into her stomach and take the ocean for myself.”

Goosebumps rise on her skin. From what little of him that she has seen, an ocean ruled by Kunikuzushi is a terrifying notion. “And what do I get?” Mona asks, despite herself.

“You could rule with me,” he shrugs. “Or you could be a scholar. In the ocean, there is no nonsense about who can or can’t be a scholar, as long as you have the spark of insanity for it. Seems like you have more than just a spark,” he taps her forehead playfully. “Be my empress, or be the famed scholar who occasionally pops up in my throne room and bothers me with suggestions. I don’t mind either way.”

“What will you have me do, exactly?”

“Pose as my wife,” he seems to have the answer prepared already. “That way, you don’t need to join my mother’s collection. She’ll want to keep you around, which I’m counting on, but you won’t be expected to do anything for her. Not while I’m there.”

It is unthinkable. Mona knows nothing about court politics, and she knows even less about the kingdom in the bottom of the ocean. What he is proposing—to be his bait, to be the shiny prize that gets him into the sea goddess’ good graces—is a plan she would have rejected without hesitation if it came from anyone else. 

And yet…

There, she thinks. A place for someone like me. 

“Or you could take my first offer,” he says upon her lack of response. His tone is neutral, flat—betraying no hint of disappointment. “Run away and try your luck in another country.”

“I need to look after my mother,” she resists. “I can’t leave her.”

He clicks his tongue. “We’ll leave gold for your mother, and once the ocean is mine, I’ll come get her for you if you’d like. I refuse to be responsible for her, though—she’s your burden to look after.”

“My mother’s not a burden,” she storms.

“If you say so,” he yawns. “So?”

Mona jumps off the bed, then promptly trips when her knees give way under the pressure. Kunikuzushi catches her with a fast-moving tentacle; she dismisses the organ, then gestures behind her. “If I agree,” she announces, jutting her chin and pointing at the books, “all of this becomes mine.”

“Can you even read all of them?”

“I can read the Latin script,” she bristles, “and you’ll teach me the ones I can’t read.”

“Seems like a daunting task for me,” he exaggerates, feigning horror.

“And,” she continues, “no more storms. You’ll reign in that temper of yours. No more yearly sacrifices, either—you’ll protect Yogyakarta without them.”

“You’re imposing sanctions on me,” he sulks. “I wasn’t even going to ask for them, anyway. I don’t need a harem.”

“I’ll only help you if you agree to these conditions,” Mona puts her hands on her hips, stern.

He looks to the ceiling and makes a dramatic show of considering her terms. What there is to consider when she is merely asking him to stop getting innocent people caught in the crossfire of his rage, though, she doesn’t know. Perhaps it truly is that difficult for him to control his emotions.

He needs to work on that if he wants to rule, she shakes her head.

“Fine,” he says. “Fine. I’ll agree to your tyrannical demands.”

“If I’m a tyrant,” she harrumphs, “what does that make you?”

He grins and offers his hand just as he did before, when he wanted to bed her. This time, though, he isn’t asking for her body. He is offering her a place in the kingdom he intends to conquer, a seat of power right beside his, should she ever want it. “We could be tyrants together,” he sings. “The monster king and the mad queen.”

“I’m not mad.”

“Coming here with the intention to die says otherwise.”

“That was before I knew who you were,” she scolds. “Now that I do, I need to make sure this ridiculous plan of yours doesn’t affect the people on land.”

One limb shoots forward, curls around her waist, and pulls her back to him. Mona yelps, her stomach colliding with face as he rests his chin there. 

“I look forward to conquering the ocean with you,” Kunikuzushi hums.