I'm floating blissfully, face up to the sky's blue depths, when something closes softly round my legs and pulls me down. My underwater eyesight is good, for a bear, and I can see the weird blue-green tube (tentacle? worm?) that has my feet grasped together in its swollen tip, its far end lost to sight in the ocean below. It's boneless, a bit slimy, a little stretchy, and my teeth and claws can't hurt it as it drags me smoothly downward. End of game then, goodbye; I'm to be one with the deep. Everyone said a rip-current would have me one day, but it seems the universe kept something special for my arrant contempt of swim-safety.

I'm toast but so's everyone eventually; it's the journey to toastness that matters. I could put up a doomed heroic fight and drown quick; or else conserve my oxygen, go with the ride, and maybe stay conscious long enough to see what thing has me before it ends me. Easy choice: I would go out as I lived, a nosy bruin.

And so here I am on my last one-way journey. My body is calm and relaxed in the arcane 'drowner's trance' I learned in my teens from an otherwise dull cult, that permits one to survive hours on a lungful of air. Chill water flowing up round me, my fur ruffling and swimsuit flapping around my hips. Above me the bright beautiful surface, a shrinking glimmering disk of light; my world, my life, what would have been my future, farewell. Below, the mysteries in the deep and my new, short future. My vision can reach only so far but I fancy there are shapes down there, great shifting forms.

And as I near the bottom I see it's no fancy at all. In stories the monsters of the sea are vast octopi, supersized eels, maybe the odd colossal whelk. The things I am descending down among are something else again and nothing like anything in any bestiary ever. Bulbous heads, huge to colossal, no features but for two vast bulbs of eyes, all pupil, and mouths elongated into reaching tubes such as that which holds me. Bodies... I can't see those. Maybe they're vast worms, heads alone protruding from their burrows. Or maybe they're *all* head, some kind of barnacle. Obvious how they get by: those great eyes make out distant shapes above, and those mouths reach up to grasp the swimmer. My own captor is at the small end, ideal size for snatching foolish bathers; the greater domes around me must go for shark or maybe whale. Strange to find such beings crowded into our little bit of sea; maybe they've gathered for a parliament or party.

So I gaze at the beasts and imagine them gazing back in wonder or annoyance or grudging respect at this impudent prey-creature, staying alive long enough to gatecrash their big do. And then... the mouth holding me begins to *suck*. Waves of contraction pulling me down and in. It engulfs my shanks, knees, begins to take my thighs. Final act of my demise; glommed, swallowed, passing from the sight of those great witnesses. The trance could keep me awake and comfortable for a couple more hours, but the stomach I'm approaching will no doubt cut that short. Fortunate that the cult also taught a "digestion trance" that permits you, if swallowed alive, to dissolve in painless peace and merge with the soul of your devourer. Not the scene I was expecting to find a next life in, but as a wandering thought in these no-doubt contemplative minds I could maybe plant the suggestion that bear-shaped or swimsuit-wearing prey are nutritionally unsound. And so gain the status of a decent, if obscure, guardian spirit.

And so, as I am slurped from this existence, I lift one paw in a final gesture of farewell and gratitude to the surface world for tolerating my lackadaisical ursine soul, and release a little of my last breath to rise
as a glimmering symbol of transience and rebirth and whatyouwill.