Serina: Watcher in the Water

Hazel had set off across the beach soon after the rest of the clan had returned to their huts for the night. Without anyone else to bother her now, she could fish the night away. Her bunkmate had already grown tired of warning her about the dangers of fishing alone at night, that the beasts of the twilight could snatch her away with no one to watch over her, but she'd done this for many nights now and knew that a simple torch was enough to keep the terrors from the darkness away. None ever came closer than the faint shadows on the distant horizon, only barely visible against the glow of planetlight. The heavy ogres on two legs, the snaggletoothed stalkers on three legs, and the slinking prowlers on four legs, she knew them all. They knew better than to get too close to the village. The notion that some unseen monster would snatch them up was just silly, something meant to keep the children from wandering too far into the wilderness.

It was better at night, no other boaters around to compete with, all the seabirds that liked to snatch away fish while she wasn't looking were asleep in their roosts, and the fish were always attracted to the single curious light, so it was easy to get a lot of them. Sure, it might be a little boring, but  She made sure that the rope anchoring the small raft to the beach was secure before pushing the craft into the water to set it adrift. The rope was about a hundred strides in length, allowing the boat to reach just to the edge of the shallows where the seabed sloped too deep to see the bottom anymore. Hazel had learned that fish that did not appear in the day would rise out of the deeper waters into the shallows every night, ones which were completely naive to the fishing lure and its bait. Bringing home a big bag of fish every night had certainly helped her family tolerate her late fishing trips, and sleeping the mornings away as a result.

Tonight was little different, and within a few hours she'd reeled up a couple dozen fish, both of the scaly and stalk-eyed varieties. It was mostly only small fry though, and she hoped to land something more substantial before pulling the boat back ashore for the night. Another hour went by, but nothing bit the line. That was strange. There seemed to be an unusual stillness with the waves. Hazel decided to end the trip and had begun pulling on the rope when something struck the raft, pushing it nearly twenty strides to the left. She stumbled inside as the boat violently lurched back and forth. Lifting herself up, she scanned the horizon for anything that could've hit the craft; the other end of the rope was still securely anchored at shore and there was no stray crag jutting from the waves. Aside from the receding waves of the impact, the water was still utterly calm. But Hazel thought something still wasn't right, a feeling in her gut; she grabbed the torch off of its holder and peered over the edge of the raft. It could only illuminate a depth of maybe one or two strides, but it turned out to be enough.

It was something big, very big; so big that the light could not find the ends of it. A strange bulbous object as large as her head hung in the water, attached to something dark. The scale of it prevented Hazel from being able to immediately decipher what she was even looking at, until she lowered the torch for a closer look and the dark oblong pit of the bulb narrowed in response to the light.

Hazel would never be able to convince anyone else of exactly what she saw that night, but convinced herself that the tranquility of the night was not worth potential encounters from the vast and unknown terrors of the darkness.