We heard the distress of the deep vents long before your instruments felt the tremors.

While you were cross-checking your readings with dry eyes, drinking coffee and crafting ill-considered hypotheses, we called a convocation in the mid-waters.

It should’ve been all of us, to make such a monumental decision, but if we hesitated too long we’d be condemned to be no more than onlookers to catastrophe.

It’s a source of perpetual wonder to us that you know so little about your own planet.

“Ah, but we cannot breathe beneath the waves,” you say as if to excuse your ignorance, yet you have crested the very sky and charted the surface of the moon. We would show you all the wonders of the deep, if we trusted you not to break them.

We listen at your undersea cables, decode your transmissions, learn of your work. Your lack of concern swings our vote towards action.

We hear the thick-shelled gurgle of magma chambers beneath the ocean floor. We hear the crack and shatter of plugs long sealed. There is a heat welling beneath the earth and sea, a pressure that makes our ears ache with longing to be anywhere in the vast ocean but here.

Instead, we swim to the shallow waters where the sun crisps our skin and blinds our eyes.

The fishermen of your island are the first to learn that mermaids are real.

They listen, thank the depths. You listen, your volcano home dormant but with your seismographs fresh in your mind.

You and all the people of your city, you heed our warning, and flee to your boats.

And when the deep vents bellow and moan, when the mountain heaves and splits in a thunderous cacophony, when the flows of incandescent ash pour from the sky and rush across the sea, we await in our multitudes to guide you down into the cool waters.