She was going to kill her, she was going to vanquish her evil for once and all. She would crush her with the hydraulic-driven arms of the suit. She would mash her to paste and, in doing so, would feel free for the first time in her life.

But…Regina was changing. She was mutating into some horrendous benthic life-form. Her flesh had gone gray and was made of huge overlapping scales. It was oily and shiny like wet sealskin. Her limbs were weirdly contoured with bony V-shaped ridges that pushed up from under her skin. Her eyes were huge and glassy like those of a fish. When she reached out a hand to her daughter, the fingers were long and clawed, a fine webbing between each finger.

Javy screamed because this was the real Regina. It was insane and impossible and couldn’t possibly be, but it was: here was the true Regina that had been hiding under her mother’s skin. Her head narrowed like that of a wolffish, her lips huge and blubbery. A spiny ridge ran from her forehead and over the crown of her head. Gill slits fluttered at her neck.

“I didn’t want you. I did not want their seed growing in me…but it was predestined that I bring you to term. That I keep you and feed you, nurture you like a fingerling in a hatchery until the time came when I could release you into the silent depths,” Regina told her. “Oh, but I sinned. I turned against them. I disobeyed the teachings of the elder ones. I kept you from the water. I would not listen when they called for you. I coveted you because you were mine and I would never let them have you! Never let them take you down into the deeps. I would not have you swimming down in the weeds and rotting shipwrecks…you would never know the crystalline cities at the bottom of the sea.”

“Stop it!” Javy shrieked. “I won’t hear anymore! You disgust me! Everything about you disgusts me!”

Regina had risen now, a mutant, ichthyic horror that had evolved to live in the darkest depths of the oceans. “I tried to keep them from you. I tried! But you wouldn’t keep away from the water. You were drawn to it. Deep inside you, you wanted to return to them, to dive amongst the ancient reefs and offer yourself at the sunken Temple of Dagon—”

But Javy would hear no more.

She jetted from the chamber and through the tunnel and she was back in the enclosing forest of tube worms, moving through them like a mouse through a field of wheat.