The dark listened back.

I had learned to make the clicks small, to let them slip out like seeds and wait for their echoes to grow. Tonight, the echoes returned crowded and nervous. The shelf’s stone sang in soft curves, the vent mouths hummed, the plankton fog answered like rain on canvas. Beneath it all, a thin ripple moved where nothing should have moved, quiet and purposeful, never touching rock, never brushing the silt, following the places my pulses had been.

I cut my clicks to whispers and let the current carry me. The water tasted metallic from distant vents. My new fin ridges fluttered in the slow flow like knives wrapped in cloth. The ache from the feast lingered in the bone. I had learned to keep pain as background, the way a sailor learns to keep salt in his mouth.

There, to my right, the ripple again, narrow as rope, long as hunger. When I sent a testing pulse, the echo returned in a band, slim and clean, no fins to catch the water, no broad plates to scrape stone. An eel shape, sleek and patient. It had shadowed my calls since the last cycle, waiting for a weakness I could not afford to show.

I went still and counted my breath through the gills. The shelf sloped ahead into a run of low chimneys where warm gas seeped in threads. I had scouted a crevice there two days ago, small and close, with a pocket of trapped warm water and a folded lip of stone that hid a body my size from the ceiling. I had planned it as a refuge, not as bait. Plans change. The sea sees to that.

The eel’s pressure signature slipped left, then right again. It learned my pauses. I tasted the faint oil-sour of its skin. The smell carried old kills and the sharp tang of a hunter that had eaten fry and would eat me if I flinched.

You chose to hear the abyss. Now it is hearing you.

I slid toward the chimneys, letting the slope work for me, no tail stroke heavier than the vent’s own sigh. Behind me, the ripple tightened. The eel closed distance in slow crescents, hugging my wake, refusing to hurry. It knew patience the way I knew prayer.

I clicked once into the vents, a thin needle of sound. The echoes returned hot and broken, the gas plumes hissing as they lifted. Between them ran cold lanes like alleys. I mapped them in my head, then swallowed the last of my fear and added a second click toward my right to make myself seem wider than I was.

The eel took the bait. Its pressure signature leaned toward the false width. It slid higher, expecting me to break left into open cold.

I turned for the chimneys instead, head down, belly low, into the heat.

The plumes scalded the edges of my ridges. My scales complained in a shiver of bright pain, then settled. The chimneys were short and cracked. The gas coughed upward in threads as wide as my jaw. I wove through them, remembering Day 3, the way soft sacks had taught me to bend in a single wave, the way shell meat had layered my plates against scrape and heat. The eel followed, careful, smooth, kind to itself. It hated heat. Its skin tasted of oil. Oil runs from fire.

The current tightened as the chimneys narrowed the lane. That was what I wanted. A narrow place is a new rule. A mouth must choose an angle there. A tail must choose whether to lash or fold. Choices create mistakes.

The eel sent a probe of its own. A high click touched my right flank and came back fast, telling it where my ribs pressed against the column. I felt the sound inside the bone. The answer that reached me from the eel was satisfaction.

It thinks it reads you.

I widened my jaw and let my glow show a little, not hunting light, only enough to paint a false margin on the plume. Then I sent a soft click toward the ceiling to mask the turn of my head.

The eel lunged.

It came as a ribbon of muscle, mouth opening in a clean oval, teeth set in twin rows like small anchors. The water slurred around its skin. Its tail wrote a straight line through the plume and cut the heat in two. It expected me to flee the vent seam, to run left into the cold so it could rake my flank and coil for the second bite.

I went forward instead, straight into the hottest breath of the vent, then dropped under the lip of a cracked chimney where the plume caved into a bubble of nearly still water. The heat clawed my snout and made the ridges hiss. The eel struck into open lane, jaws snapping on nothing, eyes wide like coins as the bubble hid me for one heartbeat.

One heartbeat is a gift if you have rehearsed. I had.

I twisted inside the pocket, one clean wave from snout to tail, and fired out of the bubble at the eel’s neck as it overran the lane. My jaw closed where the jaw meets the spine. The teeth I had were not many, but they were honest. Shell meals had taught them to hold. The bite sank to bone.

The eel bucked. Its tail lashed the chimney and shattered a piece of crust. Heated silt rose in a red sheet. The world turned to grit and heat and the smell of cooked scale. My head rang. I held with everything I had, twisting to keep the eel’s back against the stone. If it wrapped me now, the fight would become a scalding rope.

The eel understood the geometry as well as I did. It surged backward, not forward, pulling my body past the lip so it could spin me out into open water. I let it, then I turned the spin into my own roll and used the momentum to rake my fin ridges across its gill slit. Bone met delicate tissue. The ridges did what knives do.

The eel recoiled. Its mouth opened in a long O that poured bubbles. The sound it made was not a cry. It was a pressure drop, a sudden emptiness that pulled water against my face and shook my teeth.

We separated, each of us choosing a new angle. The vent lane choked on grit. My glow painted nothing but haze. Sound became the only honest map.

I clicked, small, rapid, a string of notes no longer than fingernails. The returns came from the broken chimney on my left, the short ridge behind, the eel ahead, lower now, circling for a belly cut. Its pulse answered mine, quicker, less certain than before. Blood changed the shape of its sound. Wounded things sing differently.

We closed again. I feinted toward the wider lane to the right, showing the eel a long side, then cut across a hot thread to strike from above. The eel reacted faster than I had hoped. It whipped its head up and caught my tail.

Pain ripped through me, bright as lightning in a cabin at night. I felt the plates tear. Flesh opened. The ridge line that had made me proud became a row of little mouths as the membranes split. The eel’s teeth sank and held.

I rolled into the plume and dragged the eel through the heat. It did not let go. Its body writhed, cursing the vent with its skin, but its jaw stayed clamped. A hunter like this learns to pay pain forward. I could not outwait it there. I needed stone.

I kicked backward with the strength the jelly had bought me yesterday, a fast, ugly thrust. We slammed the chimney’s base. The shock knocked grit loose from the roof and showered us both with ash. The eel shook its head to clear its eyes. I felt a tooth shift in my tail. I drove him again, this time into the ridge behind me. The jolt snapped two teeth from my flesh. The eel’s jaw slipped. I tore free and left meat behind.

Blood slid away in ribbons. The current took it toward open cold. A promise to any mouth that the vent had guests. I could not let this fight last.

The eel came from below, throat swelling for a gulp, planning to take my belly where scales thin near the gills. I snapped my jaw shut to keep my own glow from telling it my range, then clicked once at the stone behind its head. The echo reached the eel a breath before my body did. It flinched toward the rock in reflex. The mistake opened its neck again.

I took that place, not clean, not pretty, with a bite that would have shamed a market dog. I tore. The eel spasmed and slammed me into the chimney. The world stuttered white. Heat pounded my side. My head swam.

Taken from NovelBin, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

Hold. Do not let this become a second story.

The eel’s tail lashed my shredded fin again. Pain screamed up my spine. I tasted my own iron and the vent’s mineral breath and the eel’s oil-sour stink. My teeth slid on wet bone.

I changed grips and bit higher, where the skull narrows. I did not try for a killing clamp. I tried for a lever. I forced the head back against the ridge and used the wall to keep it there. The eel’s body thrashed. It wrote curses down my ribs. I felt plates lift. I dug the ridges of my fin into its lower jaw and raked backward with all the strength those ridges had given me. Flesh tore. The eel thinned.

A pulse rolled through the stone. Not from us. From deeper vents answering the fight with the earth’s own rhythm. The lane’s threads thickened. Heat jumped. The bubble where I had hidden earlier swelled and burst. For one heartbeat, the water lost purchase on my skin.

In that weightless beat, the eel slipped my lever and coiled. Its body wrapped my midsection with a surge that stole breath. The pressure drove into my softened plates where the sacks had made me bend. I felt something in me creak.

The coil tightened. My gills flared, and I found only hot water.

Bend where you must, not here.

I drew what cold I could through clenched slits and spent my last clean motion on a gamble. I fired a long click straight up into the vent throat above the bubble. The sound bounced through hot gas and came back shattered, so many broken echoes that any other ear would call it noise. In that shatter, I aimed at the largest fragment, the returning piece that meant a weak spot in the chimney’s crust, then I hammered it with my skull.

The crust gave. A fist of hot water exploded downward. The eel flinched as the heat struck its eyes. The coil loosened by a finger’s width. I forced my head through that gap, pushed my jaw under its chin, and tore again, ripping thin tissue in a direction skin does not like to go.

The coil broke. The eel yanked backward in panic and made the mistake of turning broadside to find cold. I took its gill line with my fin ridge and cut deep. The ridge did not care about etiquette. It cut like a reef.

Blood poured in a thick rope. The eel struck blindly, jaw clacking on stone. It tried to reverse, then found the lane had no room left for dignity. I slammed it into the chimney one last time and kept it there while the heat and my teeth and its own panic finished what I had started.

When it finally went slack, the water carried its length down the slope like a prayer offered to the vent. I held on more from habit than need. I did not trust death until the sound inside the body stopped completely.

Silence returned, then the small noises came back, the vent’s hiss, the soft rattle of grit, the whisper of plankton. My tail hung behind me like torn canvas. My sides bled in small tongues. My jaw ached as if I had been chewing stone.

I floated in the steaming lane and counted ten breaths. At five, I threw up half of what I had earned, the feast reminding me that greed breeds debt. The water clouded rust-red. I spat until it cleared.

There was meat to be taken. The eel offered a long ledger of biomass. The vent field said to take it at once, to pay blood with blood. The new rule in me said to leave most of it to the sea.

Restraint over appetite.

I took a mouthful only, enough to steady the trembling. The meat tasted of oil and old metal. It did not charm me. It offered heavy coin with a forged king. I spat how much I could and swallowed what my body demanded. The rest I pushed down the slope to the vent’s lip so the heat could write it back into the world that had made it.

My head swam. Pain came in clean waves. I clicked once, small and careful. The echo showed no large bodies near. My blood wrote a thin trail toward cold. Predators would come if I let it run long. I had a place to reach.

The crevice waited where the ridge folded into itself near the short chimney with the cracked cap. I had scouted it on Day 3 while drawing maps in sound. It was not much to look at, a seam in stone no wider than my shoulders, but it deepened into a small room, with a roof low enough that even a toothy mouth would have to turn sideways to enter. Inside, a pocket of warm water hummed as if the vent had left a scrap of breath behind for a careful thing to keep.

I made for it now, inch by inch, letting the current do more work than flesh, tail slips as gentle as prayer. Each stroke stung where teeth had opened me. Each brush of stone wrote sparks under my skin.

When I reached the seam, I turned myself sideways and slid in. The lip scraped my wounded fin. White burned my vision for a count of two. I forced myself through and into the pocket.

The room felt like the inside of a closed hand. Warm water held me in a small cradle. The roof dipped so low my back plates clicked against it in the swell. The stone walls had worn smooth where water had circled for seasons without counting. The smell of ash was faint. The sound in here was dear. Small echoes lived close to their source and did not wander.

I curled into the room and let the tremor run out of me.

It was the first place that had felt like mine since I woke as a small thing.

I looked at the walls with my new light and named them.

Harbour.

The word did not belong here. It belonged to wood and rope and the honest scrape of hull against pier. It belonged to shouts and lantern smoke and the quiet afterward when a deck stops moving and the hands remember how to sleep. It did not belong to a pocket of hot water inside a wound in the earth.

I chose it anyway. Words are tools. Sometimes you must bring them where they do not fit and use them until they make a long cut in the world for you.

Harbour.

I pressed my head against the wall and felt the stone answer. The pressure outside seemed smaller with the word in place.

The pain had not left. My tail would scar ugly. The fin ridge was a torn saw with missing teeth. My flank burned where the eel had written its name. I would not swim prettily for days. That was the price of being more than bait.

I sent a small click around the room. The echo came back in three neat strikes. One from the roof, one from the rear wall, one from the lip. I could listen to this room and know if a shadow tried the seam before it touched me. I could rest here and not be only a moving target.

I let the warm pocket do its work. Blood slowed. The ragged edges along my fin began to close in shy kisses. The thick plates that the shell had bought me held like good planks after a storm. The jelly’s gift of motion had given my last spins the speed they required. The luminous prey had shown me the plume’s bubble and the hairline in the cap. The sacks had taught my body to bend and then to stop. Every choice I had made in hunger had come to court in this fight.

I thought of the eel’s patience, the way it had followed my quiet calls, the way it had waited for a mistake I did not make. It spoke a language I knew. Mine. It had been my first real rival, not a crushing shadow or a stupid grazer, but a hunter who read what I wrote and tried to write over it.

I had killed it.

The thought did not exalt me. It steadied me like clean water. My body had done what prey does when prey lives long enough to learn. It had used sound and heat and stone and words to survive a mouth that meant to erase it.

If I keep killing, maybe the sea will let me stay.

The sentence tasted bitter and true. There is no other prayer here. You can thank the sea, and the sea will let you thank it because the act costs it nothing. But if you wish to live, you must pay. The currency is bodies, yours if you are poor, another’s if you are lucky and mean.

I breathed and let the Harbour hold me a while longer. When the tremors quieted, I worked small mends. I brought my torn tail against the warm wall and let the heat knit the edges. I flexed the fin ridges and felt where bone had cracked. I clicked in short threads to mark the sea, and those marks came back so clean that I knew I could find my way to this room in the dark with no light and less hope.

A small grazer nosed the seam, curious, the way a gull noses a basket after market. I did not take it. I had eaten enough of the world for one night. Let it live and learn to fear warm water.

The vents shifted their note by a fraction. Far above, something large moved through cold lanes with the boredom of a thing that can eat whenever the thought pleases it. The sound touched my room in the smallest way, like a line pulled on a child’s toy. Harbour held.

I do not know when I slept. It came like a slack tide. I dreamed of rope and of my grandfather’s hands, and in the dream his knuckles turned to plates and his nails to ridges and he told me to keep my flank toward the wind and my jaw toward the seam and to count breaths until the water believed I was a rock.

I woke to quiet hearts. Mine and the vent’s. My glow had dimmed to the edge of a rumour. I sent one pulse. The seam answered clean. The world outside moved, but not for me.

I uncurled and tested my tail. Pain there, yes, but not the kind that breaks a line. I could swim without tearing more. I nosed the lip and looked out. The lane had cleared. The eel’s body was gone to the vent as planned. The ash had settled. The shelf’s soft gardens had already begun to stretch their filaments into the harm as if the earth had told them, in the language of heat, that nothing stays open long here.

I pulled back and laid my head against the wall again. I allowed myself the luxury of a thought that was not survival, only placement.

This is mine. Not the sea. Not the shelf. Not even the lane. Only this small room, this warm pocket, this fold of stone where my sound sits the way a word sits in a mouth that knows the word belongs.

Harbor.

If I live, I will return here when I can, I will mend here, I will leave small coins of food here when I am rich and take them back when I am poor. I will learn to teach my own echo to answer me in a way that says welcome and in a way that says go away. I will be a thing with a place.

It is a human thought. It does not belong in the abyss. I keep it anyway.

The System woke at last, not as a rebuke, but as a clerk who has watched a long transaction and is ready to make his entry.

[Predation Efficiency +3%]

[Safe Zone Established: Harbour]

[Day 5 Complete]

The light touched the wall and went out. I watched the place where it had been until my eyes remembered there was nothing to see.

Day 5. I had promised five. I had paid for them with pain and with other bodies and with the little sounds I had learned to make that told stone and water what I meant to do.

The sea does not bless. It does not forgive. It keeps ledgers. Tonight, for a short while, my column balanced.

I lay in Harbour and listened to the slow breathing of the earth. Then I began, carefully and without hurry, planning on how to live long enough to owe the sea interest.