Countdown ✓

Blue (24 days after)

First, my world fell apart

Next, the kingdom fell.

And then everything else vanished into thin water.

I bypassed mountains, sticks, rocks, bunt algae, fire mountain. But never have I passed something alive since the whale vanished many days ago. I haven't kept track of where I was, or where I should be, I just swam. Hunger turned into more pain, and the light of the world was extinct. I swam constantly in darkness, complaining to myself of my own hunger. I forced myself to eat almost dead plants, and often grew sick of the herbivorous churning in my chest. But there was not a fish in sight. Not even a shark.

Or a whale in my case.

I was now thousands of miles away from the equator, deep in the heart of the freezing cold waters of the southern seas. I never felt anything more agonizing than freezing myself numb. I could only float at some points, unable to even move a flipper, hence my jaws.

I was dying, a thought I never thought could come true. Once a king, now the last standing marine creature. I looked around at my dark surroundings, then swatted my tail at the sand beneath me in a quick little design in the depths of the ocean. I was low to the earth if you noticed, struggling to find meat of some sort on the ocean floor. I've come across one huge crab, which I ate in a matter of seconds. That was surely a meal.

But that was 12 days ago. Crabs aren't plentiful anymore.

The water at the surface was poisoned at this point, and the hopes of finding something great in the unknown was extremely low.

I sniffed weakly around, tasting only the strong aroma of skeletons and muddy rocks. My flipper stump, which I fixed, had heavy leaves that were crushed up together into point. This helped with my balance for now, and helped me push forwards with each swish of my flippers. Suddenly, I let out a strange cough, then wheezed hard with another painful choking crack of my throat. I shuddered once, then swallowed to release the pain. But what I tasted in my mouth from the strange feeling wasn't normal. In confusion, I opened my long snout, then closed it to see what had come out.

"Blood..." I whispered, sniffing in my own scent, then snorted hard to dispose of it.

It tasted funny.

Actually that sentence sounded weird, but I have tasted my own blood before, especially when I'm in fights, but mine was old and sour. What was happening to me? Was I truly sick? Or dying?

I had the thought soar higher than anything else in my mind as I continued to float away, fidgeting with the 27 day old scar where one of my teeth were supposed to be. A new one was coming in now, and I could feel its sharpened bone poke my flipper. I tilted my head as I turned around a circular rock, then stopped hard by twisting my flippers up into a flat shape, pausing me in mid-flow.

My heart only shattered thereafter.

I was on the edge of this huge rock plate, staring right dead center into the darkness of the blue ocean. It moved and danced like aquatic plants, then swished away into the distance. Nothing laid before me, not even the bottom of the ocean. I glanced downwards at even more darkness which in turn, like smoke from below, stretched its ghouly hands up to the surface, spreading its virus uncontrollably. The water felt warm and smelly below, and the scent burned my eyes and nostrils.

That was lava.

I spun around from the edge of the ocean, staring back at where I came from. The cold frost made me tremble, though the heat from below helped a bit, but the chances of finding food anywhere...