Chapter 2: The Octopus Garden
When he awoke the next morning in his cave at the south end of the reef, the young tangler wearily stretched his tentacles. It had been late when he had returned to the colony the night before. He hadn’t gotten a wink of sleep all night and countless images of the day that had passed still lingered in his mind. He couldn’t tell if his encounter with the swarm had been real and if he had really talked to the tangle fish or not. He wished for nothing more and yet he worried that it had all just been a dream. Driven by uncertainty, he decided that he could stop by the tangle once more during his daily treasure hunt.
Just like any other octopus, our young tangler had been born with a passion for collecting precious things. His favorites were the shimmering, colorful stones that were usually found hidden well inside the jagged rifts of the great reef. He took the most beautiful ones home to decorate his garden with them. No member of the whole colony had collected as many rare things as our young tangler and many inhabitants of the Tangle Sea visited his garden to marvel at his treasures or trade their own items for his. His garden had become a proper marketplace that was known as “Octopus Garden”.
The whole garden was filled with piles of shell, beads and stones in various shapes and colors. There were the shells of rare water snails, amber stones and many more of which even the tangler couldn’t tell the origin of.
When he got up that morning, the water had already turned a slight turquoise color and it wouldn’t be long until the first collectors would be outside his garden to trade their findings with him. In a zest for action, the young tangler stepped out of his cave and into the garden and realized immediately that the encounter with that big tangle swarm hadn’t been a dream.
The fish he’d befriended the night before were swimming all over the garden. They seemed to be drawn to the many glittering things and immediately started to polish them, arrange them and compare their weight. He recognized two of them; they were the fish that had nudged him the day before. In a rush of excitement, the young tangler took a pearl he had found in the deep waters of the Tangle Sea and held it out to the two fish. Curiously, they examined the beautiful pearl, took it from him and looked for a suitable place in the garden to carefully put it down.
When they were done, they quickly returned to the tangler and swam around him expectantly. The tangler commended the hardworking fish with a small reward from his pouch. He could hardly believe how lucky he was to finally not be alone anymore. He had made friends that understood and shared his fascination for collecting and trading rare objects.
