Clara was nothing. 

Too dark to see, too dark for breath she hid her barnacle heart. She had been forced to live at the bottom of the deep blue See-sea Sea in a world of her own after joy had been stolen from her by a sourceress and she had been left with no hope and a shrunken heart. She was so dark and twisted that she dare not emerge from her briny layer and instead had remained beyond light for so long she had almost shrunk to nothing.

But as she had shrunk, the barnacle heart had become a bigger portion of what was left and just as change seemed impossible she heard it: the faint flutter of the heart within. Through the dark it beat, tempting her memory with coral and sea pinks, starfish and sea-holly, each as precious as a pearl from an oyster. 

The only thing that stands in my way is fear, she thought,  fear of my own limitations. But I am a lion, I am Boudicca. What care I for the judgement of others? 

And so she began the long translation of herself, conjugating her past into her present.

Fernicular, fernicularum, ferniculis. 

A spell of the sea-side. A spell for raising miracles. What could it bring except release?

The great creatures of the deep swam spirals about her and a blue whale brought bubbles of crystal light to curtain her rise toward the sun. Cradled thus she began her ascent and, as she did, small joys came back to her: where the cuckoo nests, the smell of crushed summer grass, the billow of dandelion clocks and rivers of gold wind-wavering corn. Eventually she heard the bubbles fizz and pop about her and for the first time in as long as she could remember she felt the kiss of air upon her face, then she heard the scrape of a boat bottom on sand and knew that she was free.