The river was dark, cold, and solid, and, launched from the bank by her Father, she hit it with a violent slap. The dark water swamped her as she sank: freezing her limbs, filling her mouth, it forced itself down her throat, and punched into her lungs.

She was trapped, a prehistoric bug without its amber. The sandy floor touched her back, and she turned her head, her last vision clouded by however sand and water, but neither able to disguise the pale, sunken corpses of her Father's previous children.

He had cast them away, and now they lay, sunk and broken, with fish nibble, squids slithering, and the faint outlines of jellyfish as they caressed: new lovers, new punishments, kinder than anything that had held them before.

They swarmed to her, touching her, tasting, and she shivered, once, violently.