Kai

Kai was twelve, a wisp of a boy often lost in the shadows of his older, boisterous cousins. His most striking feature was the waterfall of black hair that tumbled past his shoulders, often obscuring his face, a face that held the quiet intensity of someone who spent more time observing than participating. He wasn't the type to clamor for attention; he preferred the company of the rustling leaves in the old growth forest behind his house, or the silent sway of the ocean waves at the stony beach down the road. Then came that day. A dare from those same boisterous cousins, a careless plunge from a rocky outcrop into the churning grey water. Kai, anticipating the familiar sting of the cold, instead felt… nothing. Not the desperate gasp for air, not the burning in his lungs. Instead, a peculiar calmness, a strange sense of ease. He opened his eyes, and the world shifted. The sun, a blurry disc above, dappled the water with shimmering ribbons of light. He breathed. He breathed underwater. Confusion quickly morphed into a wide-eyed wonder. The fish, darting like silver arrows around him, paid him no mind. The kelp forest, swaying gently with the current, felt like a secret garden. This was not a trick of the light, or a fevered dream. This was real. The small boy, once content in the margins, now felt a burning restlessness. A new possibility, had opened up to him. The familiar pull of the everyday had been replaced with an irresistible lure – the call of the deep. The forest held fewer secrets now; it was the ocean, the mysterious expanse where he could breathe amongst the fishes, that held the answers to his incredible new gift. So began his journey, a quest into the swirling depths of the sea and the uncharted waters of his own being. He might be small, he might be quiet, but Kai now carried the weight of this extraordinary secret. He knew that the ocean held the key. He had to understand why he, of all the people in the world, could breathe beneath the waves.