Poseidon #PlanetOrPlastic

Poseidon

I gave up on the hope that a stingray would come to save me. The sea is silent only with bubbles bursting around me.

My lungs were losing oxygen. Floating rubbish started to obstruct the only daylight I have left. Black dots started swimming in my vision. Life flashes before me.

'God help me.'

'Rare.'I heard a voice say to me.'A believer.'

A sea nymph? I blinked and stared at the lady with flowy green hair with a bottle cap in her hair. The black veins in the base her neck spread like roots of a tree.

There was bright yellow sea horse that was dabbing my wounds with Q- tip stuck to its tail.

'Thank you for making yourself useful,'She dismissed the seahorse.

'Why am I alive?'I gasped,I could breath.

'Good question, why would the Lord want you alive when you mortals are being parasites?'She scowls at me and turns her back at me.

'The Lord of the sea?Poseidon?'

'That's one of his names. Now pay your respects to him.'She sneered and crushed a floating bottle.The ocean floor strewn with the carrier's of the disease.

'Or die.'

Part of Atlantis survived. The kingdom was in mourning at the lost. The throne room emanated grief. And I, a mortal, was part of the cause.

'My son, lord, he did not deserve to die.'A turtle was sobbing in front of him. The turtle turned to me.

'You! Because of you, my son is dead! '

'So is my daughter!'Poseidon boomed with equal fury.

Only bits of pink plastic danced in the shaft of light while silence rippled in the room.

'They deserve no mercy.'The turtle spat then wadded out.

I knelt before him.

'Raise your head, believer.'

His eyes burned into me. I understood why he had mercy on me.

Poseidon raised his trident and for a moment I thought I would be blasted into a shrimp.

Instead, the trident had started peeling away. Rust and rot had started to eat at its power. I thought my eyes were affected by the sea water but there was plastic starting to wrap it like foil.

'My power is the sea.'His thousand-year-old green eyes saddened.'Only few remember.'

'Once it's tainted, it's as fragile as your mortal soul.'The trident in his hands had started to crumble.

The water dimmed around us with his words. A pillar in the throne fell between us, kicking up a wall of sand.

Atlantis was falling into ruins.

'Help the gods, believer.'He picks out a bit of plastic from the tip of his trident.

'Or this will be what's left of us.'

Floating at his fingertips, it transforms and engulfs me.

I ascend but I see his lips move, like in prayer. I have survived because what I believed in.

Change.

As I stare at the tide that brings another wave of trash, the prayer of Poseidon echoes.

'Mercy on the sea.'