Narrate the epic and fantasy novel in the style of "PBS Eons" and Stephen King , where the stingray after a battle with pirate ship, barrels of wine broke in the sea, and the stingray ingested a lot of alcohol. Provide minutiae painstaking details of the drunk stingray.

I can blend a science-documentary approach with epic fantasy and creeping, small-detail horror, though not Stephen King’s exact style.

The Ray Beneath the Red Sea

To understand how a stingray became drunk enough to challenge the moon, we need to begin with a shipwreck.

And, considerably farther back, with the evolution of a mouth on the underside of a fish.

For millions of years, that arrangement had served rays remarkably well. While the eyes watched the water above, the mouth searched the seabed below: a division of labor well suited to finding shellfish without becoming somebody else’s supper.

It was less useful for reading labels on wine barrels.

Especially labels that said:

VINTAGE OF THE DROWNED KING.
DO NOT DILUTE.
DO NOT OFFER TO THE SEA.

The pirate ship Mercy’s End had gone down at sunset.

She had fought for three hours against something her captain insisted was merely an unusually large stingray, even after it wrapped one wing around the bowsprit and looked through his cabin window.

Now her broken ribs stood in twelve fathoms of water. Her cannons lay muzzle-down in the sand. A strip of black sail moved slowly from the shattered mast, although the current had stopped.

Beneath the wreck hovered the victor.

His name, in the language of the reef, was approximately The Shadow That Passes Over You Before You Notice.

We will call him Shadow.

He was thirty feet across, scarred along the left wing, and exhausted. A harpoon had scored the thick muscle beside his tail. His mouth worked intermittently, opening and closing against a lingering taste of iron.

Then the first barrel split.

In an ordinary sea, spilled wine would disperse. Currents and an enormous volume of water would make this a poor method of intoxicating a giant fish.

But the Drowned King had never approved of ordinary seas.

His wine emerged in dark, cohesive ropes. It gathered in hollows between the ship’s timbers, clung to broken pottery, and rolled along the sand in trembling red globes.

Shadow descended toward one.

His underside brushed the seabed. Sand lifted around him in a pale skirt. Beneath his head, his mouth extended and drew in what should have been a buried crab.

Instead, he swallowed a mouthful of warm plum, old oak, and a king’s unfinished curse.

He paused.

His eyes, high on his flattened head, could not see his own mouth. Nevertheless, he appeared to consider what it had done.

Then he swallowed again.

The first change was small.

His right wing completed its downstroke a fraction later than his left.

Normally, the movement of those broad pectoral fins passed along his body in smooth waves, precise enough to carry him over the reef without touching a single branching coral. Now one wave overtook another. A wrinkle traveled toward his trailing edge and collapsed.

He listed.

Corrected.

Overcorrected.

His left wingtip struck a barrel with a hollow wooden tonk.

Shadow turned to confront the noise.

The barrel, being a barrel, offered no explanation.

He bumped it again.

This time it broke.

The wine poured over his mouth in a thick scarlet sheet.

Ten minutes later, Shadow had developed a private disagreement with the seabed.

It kept coming closer.

He would lift himself, achieve what felt like an excellent height, and then discover sand pressing against his belly again. Each contact surprised him. Each was followed by an indignant flutter that raised another cloud.

Grains lodged in the soft folds around his mouth.

A strand of eelgrass caught against his lower lip.

He expelled it with a short muscular puff.

It returned.

He puffed again.

The eelgrass settled across his face.

For several seconds, this occupied all the attention of a creature that had recently sunk a warship.

His spiracles—the openings behind his eyes through which he could draw water while resting on the bottom—opened and closed. Fine sediment stirred at their rims. The movements remained automatic, but their owner had begun making poor decisions about everything surrounding them.

He attempted to glide beneath a fallen yardarm.

He was considerably wider than the gap.

His nose entered. His shoulders followed. Both wings folded awkwardly upward against the timber.

He stopped.

Backed out six inches.

Tried the same approach again, slower.

Here we encounter a distinction familiar across much of the animal kingdom: possessing a nervous system capable of learning does not guarantee that it will learn promptly.

Especially when magic wine is involved.

Shadow eventually escaped by overturning the yardarm.

He hovered above it, breathing hard, his wing margins trembling with small corrective motions. The tremors made him resemble an enormous silk handkerchief being shaken by nervous hands.

His tail drifted sideways.

He noticed it.

Turned.

The tail followed.

He turned farther.

For one magnificent, deeply undignified circuit, the terror of the Sapphire Coast pursued the rear third of himself.

Then he forgot why he was turning.

He continued anyway.

The reef animals watched from sensible distances.

A moray withdrew into its crevice until only its nostrils remained visible. Three cleaner shrimp abandoned their usual professional confidence. A small wrasse approached, inspected the scratch beside Shadow’s tail, and retreated when Shadow attempted to settle on it affectionately.

His movements had grown expansive.

A minor adjustment of course became a sweeping bank. A routine descent became a landing that flattened a patch of seagrass. When he tried to bury himself, he beat his wings too forcefully and excavated a shallow crater.

Sand covered his back.

One eye remained exposed.

It blinked.

Strictly speaking, rays do not blink as we do.

This one did.

Far below the wreck, something heard.

Shadow rose toward the moon.

At least, that seemed to be his intention.

Its reflection lay above him in a trembling silver oval. Whenever he approached, the oval broke apart. He followed one bright fragment, lost it, and substituted another.

Near the surface, he rolled a few degrees onto his side.

One wingtip emerged into the night air.

It slapped down with a sound like a wet carpet dropped from a tower.

Shadow sank, startled by his own splash.

For a moment he hung motionless, nose slightly raised, tail drooping below him. His mouth opened twice. A faint ribbon of enchanted wine leaked from its edge and curled upward.

Then came the voice.

“More?”

It spoke from the empty wine barrel beneath him.

Shadow’s wings stopped halfway through a stroke.

The barrel stood upright on the sand now.

It had not stood upright before.

Between its cracked staves, something pale moved with the slow deliberation of fingers finding the holes in a glove.

“Come down,” said the barrel.

Shadow tried to turn away.

His right wing answered first.

His left wing answered late.

And underneath him, in the darkness where the wreck’s shadow ought to have ended, a crown began to rise.