Drown

He should have known better. He should have known about the riptide. He struggled to get his head to the surface, but it was no use. There was water all around him.

Or not all around. Or at least, not all the water was the same. Some of the water near his head was thicker, almost jellylike. He could feel it against his skin, and he knew it for what it was.

A deepling. An agent of the Bathybius, the strange entity at the bottom of the ocean. And he knew what it wanted. It was pressing against its mouth. It wanted him to open his mouth, to let a part of it in, to take in its substance. And if it did, he would become like it. He would become a deepling himself. He would be pressed into service to the Bathybius.

It was a fate that was widely dreaded. But the alternative was drowning, death.

He opened his mouth and he let it in.