From the subtle reality of that single word, Euphrates woke. Bilge hurled from his gut and his breath shook into haggard choke, blown to rasp by the end of it. The cough furled wet and streaked with mucus, and even silt bounded forth from ballooning lungs. The excrement made a slick, green pool in the crunchy brine. All he could taste was salt.

Holy shit.

Withered eyes made out the shining puddle through disgusted slants. He moaned so softly that only threads of sound surfaced in the whine. His ripples settled into a steady chop, torn open by whitewater. His body darkened. He could hear the sound of his own waves, the miserable slap of water on water - the delirious pounding in his head.

His eyes moved wearily from the shiny vomit. With every breath his colors moved a little more methodically, his brain pounded a little more evenly. Pounded out some thoughts, some associations. He could see the sky was a little whiter than the land, which was also white. He could see his own legs and feathers were just a pale, animated gray. He was the darkest thing in sight. He looked like a fluorescent shadow, something two dimensional; pinned and wriggling like a sun-nailed specimen. 

With more time, his eyes could make out little beads of dried seawater crust forming on the face of his hooves. He toyed with movement, making gradual realizations of his body, waiting to come across the fierce pain of a dismembered limb or, hell, a newly grown one. His wings were the first things to unfold, and they did so one ligament at a time, each feather meticulously inspected by unthinking eyes. He wasn't surprised about fatigue or the soreness, but his sustainability. His means to survive that swallowing and turn up on some salt flat, vomited from the goddamned ocean, in one cohesive piece. It amazed him.

What the fuck happened to me?

Did it really matter?

But suddenly the sun faded over his eyes and something (the land?) sung some distant song with the voice of a virgin. He still couldn't see anything but himself and that mucus he purged between his forelegs in the salt-sand except that everything had grown more dark, more gray and eclipsed. The haze shook him, caused his heart to throb and his body to roar whitewater waves, almost like a shaken bottle of ocean. He'd heard about the sirens, but he didn't believe in them.

Until he saw her. Cloudy eyes fought the light and their stinging to find the source of the shadow beam, a winged head and moving, desperate lips. Words he could not process. They were too fast. Everything was still in the waking.

I can't understand you, the wind is too loud.

Now he wished his tongue hadn't dissolved in his own mouth, turned slack and silver still.

The ideal scenario would be that she was indeed a siren and she came to coax him, then kill him.

He inwardly prayed that she had a starving family and he wouldn't go to waste.

But the woman appeared frantic as the mists of time gave way to revealing her innocence. He made out a single word insistence... No that wasn't it. Assistance?

So you're not going to kill me?

Well fuck.

What the hell was she thinking, asking him for assistance? He could barely move; just shitted from the bowels of the ocean, shivering and quaking with all the symptoms of dehydration and anemia and every other terminal illness under the god forsaken sky that just wasn't nice enough to do him in. If there was enough time for him to think about this, he'd probably rouse the last few pulses of adrenaline that kept him beating and shout fuck you Jesus at the top of his lungs. One because why not, and two because he was probably Jesus anyway. (Water walked his ass into the flats with pure grace. 

Just like that.)

It was just that this beautiful woman was standing over him while he writhed in his own element with wings spewing from behind her ears, like some kind of bird-deer. 

God send his angels.

"Please just kill me," he whispered, "I'm begging you."

A RIVER IN A TIME OF DRYNESS, A HARBOR IN THE TEMPEST