Now the creature inside spoke to Behemoth. Beneath a surface of dead leaves. Hidden in a pile of old clothes in the corner of a shed. You shall give up something to gain something. You shall be something else to remain your self. Like everyone. But Behemoth could not tell if this was real or a mechanism, a latch or a lever or a trick.

Off and on, on and off, flood and retreat. Carved glorious from holding ponds that flickered on and off with life and the dream intensified and Behemoth, drugged, felt himself out of water and inside the Company building. Where he had never been before.

Be calm. Becalmed. Slowed Behemoth’s breathing, sent stillness awash across it, sent a fluid language scrolling across the folds of his brain. Muddened. Obscured. Looking out through the eyes of another water creature. One suspended between life and death, between large and small. That signed language in the water, through its skin.

The inside was coming outside. The outside was going inside. Pond was desert. Desert, pond. As the Company poked and prodded Botch. Behemoth. Leviathan. The tiny fish he had been. All while the green light shone out undetected from the face upon Behemoth’s head, shining out upon all. Seeing all.

The tiny fish that sang at dawn sang out the Company’s demands as commands as scripture as control. Sang out indistinguishable. Nocturnalia a boiling red eye for the moon with the fox hidden beneath it. Revolved there. Became a parade of ghouls. Of dead things brought back to life.

What Behemoth feared now was a monster greater than himself: the Company building, that hid the sun and hid the water and how the clack of steps approaching meant nothing good and the clack of steps departing felt like pain or fury.

The passage of time was like a slab of water and cold and heat and ice and boiling oil. A slab that never resolved into a depth but could only be splayed out upon. But soon enough, Behemoth could sense the people changing under the green light.

Now the green light shone out from the people staring at the flanks of Behemoth and Behemoth, emanating that hidden light himself, could see that gaze wherever it fell upon its body. How the faces behind the gaze murmured, consulted, but in all ways slackened, receded, and expressed the failure of their experiment. Which was not the failure of their experiment but a failure of recognition.

There came a day when the green had so infected the people in the Company building that they fought over Behemoth—what should be done about Behemoth, who should do it, where Behemoth should be taken, what steps, whether steps, wither steps, no steps. But they were all the same person now. But they did not know it yet.