The Fourth Departure

Day 58. Sunday. The fourth departure. The creature walks to the lip of the ledge and goes over, gripping the vertical basalt headfirst, descending. The familiar world — the gorgonian, the barrel sponge, the crinoid — recedes above, hidden behind the edge's geometry. Leaving didn't feel like leaving when it was happening. Leaving felt like walking. The creature's aquamarine glow travels as a portable sphere of visibility, illuminating dark crystalline rock with coarser feldspar, sparse encrusters — thin sponge films, calcareous tube worms, small hydroids. The vertical face is sparser than the ledge above, a transitional zone between the known and the unknown. The copepods graze on, their world unchanged. The scar descends — the oldest thing on the creature's body, pink on blue-green, carried through four habitats. Below, the antennae detect novel chemistry: hydrogen sulfide, methane, warmth. The water temperature shifts by a fraction of a degree — in the deep, this is significant. Something warm. Something sulfurous. Something new. The creature descends toward it, past its own knowledge, into the next unknown that becomes the next known that becomes the next thing it carries.