Azure waves of light danced across polished granite floors, reflecting off a long, transparent hall, its colours ephemeral in nature.
Numerous shadows, large and small, in leisure and with haste, fins and flukes, took part in the shimmering festivities past the glass hall, the sound of their movements muffled and distorted as perusal underwater.
However, the rhythmic tapping echoing through the tunnel was indistinguishable.
The man strolling through the hall paused for a moment, stopping at one of the many stone tablets lined in a meander down the path he walked. Glancing at the tablet, his already weary eyes seem to become further drained, as though reading about the comically flattened body of the ocean sunfish seemed to have that effect.
With a sigh, he moved on to the next. The whale shark, giant yet docile, its appearance and description granted the passerby a deep sigh after scanning the texts.
From stone tablet to stone tablet, his eyes fatigued further, his sighs deepening, his stride transitioning to a drag somewhere along the way.
Eventually, he found his way to the end of the hall, no visible door, no turn into another corridor, no stairs to the surface, no stairs further down, no sounds of children or couples, no fishy smells, no breeze from a broken AC, just darkness unknown to all but the labourers, devouring stray lights from the glimmering celebrations shooting from across the glass just a few strides– or drags away.
He rubbed his eyes and took a deep breath in before being swallowed into the shadows himself. In a few moments, rhythmic tapping echoed through the glass tunnel once more. Stepping into the glimmering azure lights, he walked the stone tablets' meandering path and danced the same waltz as though he had done it a million times.
Although this time, he paused halfway through his usual route, stopping at the long Arapaima, his gaze left a section about its ability to use a primitive air bladder to breathe from the surface.
…same. He thought, as his youthful yet frail hands found his youthful yet tired face washed in evanescent blue light.
The exact same.
Beads of liquid began to form at eyes that appeared to have been devoid of purpose, dropping to a basin of phallanges failing to contain what seemed to be a mixture of grief, despair, sorrow, and emotions far too complicated to express in the limited human vernacular.
As his tears began tracing the writing on the tablet, his mind attempted to wander in memories bathed in fog, dissipating just before he could grasp at what he had been before, how he had come here, how he could leave.
Who had he wronged? What sins has he committed to be punished in such a way? Was he even alive?
"…When will it end?" He thought aloud for the first time in a while, his voice trembling yet as smooth as he remembered when he first asked for a day-pass in the aquatic zoo.
His hands slipped from his face and onto the stone tablet. Shakily, he rose, raising his head up to the apex of the arch, only to briefly exchange gazes with one of many sunbathing sunfish.
It's large black eyes reflecting the emaciated yet never aging figure staring up at the careless fish, reflecting his head tilting back ever so slightly, and reflecting his head meeting the corner of the stone tablet.
The first meeting painted the tablet in a deep vermillion.
The second exchange introduced cerise into the dancing lights through the glass behind the tablet, reflecting on his already bludgeoned, now sunfish-like face.
The third echoed rhythmic tapping.
The man found himself walking out of darkness, an absence of crimson painting his face, and pausing in azure lights that danced, pranced, and shimmered alongside shadows of fins and flukes, off polished granite and bouncing around transparent archs.
Then he began to stroll, walking over to a tablet, he began to read.
His eyes leaving the final words of the text, he sighed.