Dagon Explains Nothing

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Dagon rose out of the water like an official document no one had requested.

He was not the monstrous kind, not tonight. He was organized. Assyrian. Profile view. Beard arranged in obedient curls. The fish cloak draped properly over his shoulders as if it had attended university. He held the monolith with administrative calm.

The man on the rocks screamed.

Dagon did not scream. Gods of the Near East do not scream. They gesture.

He raised one carved hand toward the cuneiform slab as if presenting a receipt.

“Observe,” he said, though his mouth did not move. Relief figures rarely move. “You are misfiled.”

The man crawled backward, slipping in seawater, which was behaving like seawater and not like metaphor, although it would later become metaphor in three separate literary traditions.

Dagon continued emerging, but in a respectable, lateral way, like a bas-relief deciding to become dimensional out of professional obligation.

He was not dripping. Dripping is romantic. He was eroded. The sea had sanded him into bureaucratic permanence.

“I am not a monster,” Dagon clarified, because clarification is important in difficult conversations. “I am agricultural infrastructure.”

The moon hovered like an unpaid supervisor.

The man attempted to faint, but fainting is theatrical and he lacked rehearsal. Instead he lay on his side, blinking, like someone who has just realized history is carved in stone and he is not.

Dagon leaned toward the monolith and gently tapped it with one monumental finger. The carved figures on the slab — tiny dignified humans frozen mid-gesture — looked much calmer than the living one on the beach.

“See?” Dagon said. “They stand properly.”

The sea lapped around his waist in compliance with ancient treaty.

Somewhere inland, wheat grew, indifferent.

The man finally managed to speak.

“What do you want?”

Dagon paused. The pause was geological.

“I want nothing,” he said. “I have already been carved.”

This disappointed everyone.

A wave struck the rocks with the sound of a closing book. The moon continued to supervise.

Dagon did not lunge. He did not roar. He simply existed with uncomfortable authority, half relief, half surf.

The man slowly stopped screaming, which is the first step in becoming historical.

“Will you drag me into the sea?” the man whispered.

Dagon considered this. The fish cloak shimmered like an old story being retold without enthusiasm.

“No,” Dagon replied. “You will write about it.”

And with that, he became slightly flatter, slightly more symbolic, and the night arranged itself into margins.

The sea remained. The stone remained. The man remained uncertain.

Which is how civilizations begin.