Fathom

the whale who kept the deep

Down past the last of the light there is a quiet so old it has a keeper. Fathom holds the deep the way a librarian holds a library: patiently, entirely, with one enormous eye half closed. The sea floor beneath him is cobbled with sunken chests of oud wood, steeping in cold salt water for a hundred years until the resin turned blue and strange and holy. He guards it all, and pays himself in ambergris, which is his to give, being a whale. Once a year he rises to escort a lost paper boat to the horizon. Fathom is his kingdom, bottled: blue oud and cold sea salt, true ambergris, dark cedar from drowned ships.