I stepped out onto the quad with my coffee. A light fog had settled over the campus, hanging low like it belonged there. I looked up from my coffee and saw a pale shape suspended in the fog—hanging from the corkscrew branches of the old oak by the lecture hall. A jellyfish.

I stopped walking.

The thing pulsed, slow and deliberate, its translucent bell catching what little light filtered through the mist. I’d seen plenty of jellyfish before. My brother had taken me beachcombing on the Oregon coast when we were kids, turning over rocks and finding anemones, watching crabs scuttle sideways. But jellyfish weren’t supposed to be airborne. Jellyfish weren’t supposed to be on land at all.

I moved closer. The fog had gathered against its surface, thick and deliberate. When I touched it, the surface yielded easily beneath my fingertips. The fog rearranged itself around my hand like it was tasting me.

A student hurried past on the walkway. One of the jellyfish’s tentacles brushed against their arm. They paused, glanced down, shrugged, and kept walking.

I started back to my classroom. Something soft gave way beneath my shoe. I looked down. A second moon jelly, squished flat on the concrete.

I crouched and pinched the edges and dropped it onto the pavement. Then I stood and looked around. I counted ten jellyfish total. One jellyfish, I could have dismissed. Some elaborate prank. A biology department joke. Ten was too many.

I taught my lecture anyway. I wasn’t sure what else to do. One of my students had their phone volume up just loud enough for me to catch a local news report between their texts: Unusual sightings along the coast. Dead fish washing up on beaches. Patches of fog appearing as if out of nowhere.

By afternoon I was back in the lab. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, that particular hum that always made me feel like I was working inside a machine. I approached the axolotl tank. The axolotl was buried under the sand, like it always was. They were cryptic creatures. Secretive. I understood that better now.

Then I saw it—fog pooling along the bottom edge of the doorway. Not mist. Fog. Dense and deliberate.

Within the fog was a ghostly shape, a tiny jellyfish drifting through the air like something out of a dream I’d forgotten having. I watched it slip through the keyhole and reform on the other side.

I captured it in a specimen tub. My hands weren’t quite steady, but they were steady enough. The tiny bell pulsed, hair-thin tentacles tasting the air, and I thought about the drain cover, how the slits were barely wide enough for a finger.

Then the drain cover flexed.

Dozens of translucent blue tendrils forced themselves through the narrow slits, writhing and knotting together into something larger than the drain should have allowed. Then it stopped.

I leaned against the desk. The jelly in the specimen tub pulsed and turned in the air, pivoting toward my face like a silent taunt.

I snatched it and dropped it into the specimen tub and snapped the lid shut.

The television in the break room hummed. I caught fragments of the news report while I washed my hands: Unusual phenomena spotted in coastal areas. Dense patches of fog appearing and disappearing. Aquatic anomalies in the water table.

The axolotl twitched and finally emerged from his hiding spot, that perpetual smile on his face, those feathery gills drifting in the water. I looked at the tub beside him. The tiny bell pulsed rhythmically, its hair-thin tentacles tasting the air.

And I understood—with the certainty of someone who has watched something impossible become real—that the fog was not coming from outside. It was coming from below. It had been here all along. It was older than the campus, older than the town, older than any map anyone had ever made of this place.

And it was waking up.