We all stood together on the deck, dumbstruck by still being alive. The world had been storm and death for so long, blood-warm rain and then blood in place of rain when our harpoons rammed deep enough, it didn’t feel possible for us to have finally burst through into clear air and sunrise. A world where being alive was as easy as swaying with the waves.

The creature was still sinking. It would be for days, maybe, for weeks, as the ocean heaved and gulped and tried to make room for its colossal bulk. The water around its doomed island of a corpse churned and heaped black-green and thick with its blood, blistering where it met salt, thrashing where it consumed unlucky fish. Their eyes glittered unblinking through the flood, staring foam starting to swirl down around the flank of what we had killed.

The whirlpool that bore it down into the depths, pallbearer mixed with its own blood, might live longer than any of us. They might have to draw it on maps, chart around it with ships. We stood there with dead fish slapping against our battered hull, alive, by god, against all odds against a god, but I don’t think one of us felt like we had accomplished something great.

Hollowed-eyed, clutching our harpoons, somehow alive, I think we were all just wondering whether we would have to apologize to our children for this, and their children, and everyone else who lived on the edges of what we had done to the sea.