Fact: A mantis shrimp can strike at 23 meters per second, causing the water around it to boil. The force (which is the equivalent of being hit by a .22 caliber bullet) not only smashes their prey's shell, it also dismembers them.

Your name is DD. You go by Dede for long, but no one seems to notice. You like reading, musing, and scaring people half to death. How lucky people are to spy the end before it consumes them.

You’re tall for your age, which, by your last count is somewhere between 156 and 162. The older you get, the more numbers shrink in value. Plus, no one throws birthday parties for the technically dead.

Allow me to explain. You’re too humanoid to be called a phoenix, though, to your credit, you have indeed risen from death’s ashes. You’ve got the blackened corneas to prove it. So, you refer to yourself as a Gwisin. You kinda look like one too with your perpetually tattered clothing. Your near-translucent skin. You have visible lines of thought where veins appear in the living, so you wear black sleeves that hang from your arms like the branches of a weeping willow.

I guess you’re somewhat of a…transposed Gwisin. Light hair, dark clothes. And I guess there aren’t too many water ghosts who wear glasses. You do have one glaring similarity with these spirits, though. You have unfinished business. You have unfinished business, bad.

There was a writer way back over one-hundred-something-odd years ago who lived…er…in the southernish part of the UK (I’ve never been great with maps.) Anyway, he had a name that you hate when I bring up so I won’t… He was a fantastic poet. Wrote stanzas that could bruise even the hardest of hearts. His masterwork was a poem titled "Jawafra, Blade of Fate." Rumor had it, Emily Dickinson once admitted he had “potential.” Well, that “potential” wriggled through his ears and messed with his head. The possibility of greatness fried his will to write. He was afraid and yet expectant. Thrashed his creativity with demands. It was all too much. His confidence was black and blue… and in the midst of that madness, he created you. DD, Defines Delight. You were more than a figment of his imagination. You were his best friend.

The two of you made quite a pair. The proof lay in his manuscripts. And his manuscripts lay in his little seaside cottage. You know, the cottage that…

I remember that day. Boiling waters rose and punched through that living space. Feasted on its innards. Spat out the bones, they did. The ocean swallowed the poet’s home along with all his poetry.

And I do mean ALL his poetry. There was nothing left in him, the poor man. You begged him to try again. To put on his writing spectacles and tease out something new. You’ll never forget that look in his eyes, the day he quit writing. As his tears fell, you kneeled to catch them. They burned through you like fire.

“I am not, so I cannot,” the ex-poet whispered. Then he threw his spectacles into the sea. The force of his throw carried you with it. He drowned his dreams alongside his best friend.

You were supposed to die that night, right next to a pair of dark lens glasses. But you didn’t. And for the longest time, you didn’t know why.

I’m only a voice in your head so that’s a section of backstory that I personally don’t understand. Maybe the gods took pity on you. Maybe it was all just a bad dream.

Or maybe it was fate.

(From the Tilda Universe)