Chapter 1
Chapter
One
Lady Leviathan stirs in her primeval seafloor bed, the kraken goddess of the abyss waking from a centuries-long slumber.
She unfurls her tentacled arms one by one, uncoiling kinks, shaking off stiffness. Nodes of golden light flicker to life beneath slippery, dark blue skin as she stretches, dormant no longer.
As she blinks away sleep, gathering her bearings, she registers a new sound.
Ambient ocean noise vibrates all around, louder and more forceful than anything she’s ever heard before. And her memory is long. Almost as long and enduring as the ocean itself.
This noise is not beautiful like whalesong. She strains and yearns for that beloved, melodious sound, but the lullaby that carried her into sleep has dimmed, drowned in a riotous roar of discordant grinding and rumbling.
Shifting tectonic plates never bothered her. Nor the breaking of Pangaea. This, however, is jarring to her core, almost painful as it reverberates through connective tissue and muscle. She waits for the noise to pass. Whatever is making that maddening sound has to stop.
She waits. And waits.
While many seafolk can hold their breath for hours, no creature Lady Leviathan knows has this kind of relentless vocal endurance. The kind that drones on and on without a single pause.
Not even an existence as primordial as hers is enough to foster the kind of patience necessary to outlast it.
She’s befriended many large creatures in her time, the Megalodon and the Mosasaur, largely unbothered by anything because of their sheer size, but even this would’ve irritated them.
And the majestic Blue Whale, for all its patience and peaceful nature, must also find this difficult to stand.
If the mighty Blue Whale still lives, that is…
Dread sinks into the pit of her belly, knotting it tight.
This sometimes is the price of rest—missing things, awaking to find that much has changed, and not always for the better.
There’s no greater grief than emerging from a much-needed slumber, one that allows her to endure the toll of endless time, and learning a fellow sea creature has gone extinct.
As the horrid droning continues and shows no sign of stopping, her lights sparkle in an erratic, panicked sequence.
The noise is too much. And something should be done about it. It cannot be allowed to continue forever.
The worst comes from above.
As she pushes off from the muck in the ocean’s deep, a silt cloud blooms. Though it cannot be seen in the inky blackness of the abyss, she feels it brushing the fine hairs that coat her skin.
Only the bioluminescence her fellow creatures make, a beautiful language of light, pulses slow and languid in the dark.
They are calmer than her.
But how can they be so calm in the face of this ceaseless noise?
She drifts toward the surface, her body gradually acclimating to the decreasing pressure, changing form and density. Whatever it takes, she will silence that awful racket.
Creatures scatter from her massive path, lights flashing in alarm.
Centuries are nothing when one has lived for billions of years.
And yet, here she is, as constant as the sea, creating chaos in the deep.
It makes no sense. She is not the thing to fear.
Despite her size, she never has been. Their reaction hurts more than taking a harpoon to the heart—and she should know. One of hers has been nicked before.
Most of the creatures surrounding her emit blue or green light. Others, the sneakier bunch, emit red, invisible to their prey. They don’t truly flee, just hover beyond her reach.
No doubt they heard from their foreparents what destruction her mighty multitude of arms could do, and that’s what they remember most. She wouldn’t harm them, though. Not on purpose. Even as hungry as she is after her long slumber, that’s not what she eats.
Voices all around whisper, a chorus of hope rising. All alarm is forgotten as memory sinks in.
“She’s awake!”
“The Great Devourer has returned.”
“We are saved!”
“Do you think she can make it stop?”
Saved from what? The noise? It is quite irritating, maddeningly so, but her fellow seafolk seemed unbothered by it just a moment ago. Perhaps the clamor is not a new thing to them, but rather something they’ve resigned themselves to in her absence to survive.
As Lady Leviathan rises from the deep and her sleep-laden senses sharpen, she detects something else that has changed. Something even worse than the constant wretched racket. Everything about the water is wrong. Its taste, its scent, its touch upon her skin. It’s dirtier, oilier. Cloying.
This has to be a bad patch.
The farther she travels from the ocean floor, the more dread sinks to the pit of her stomach. The silt and muck distracted her before, but there is no denying it now. This isn’t the ocean she remembers at all.
Frantically scrubbing at her arms, Lady Leviathan tries to get the slimy film off her skin even knowing it’s futile. She can’t escape the very water she swims in. And what are these tiny infuriating particulates of unliving matter? Not plankton, that’s for certain, though just as pervasive.
Plankton she respects. Not this new insidious presence.
She shudders, the force of her agitation rippling out in a shockwave.
Each draw of breath through her gills is filthy and clogged.
While she can suck in enough oxygen to live, it doesn’t feel like enough.
It’s like she’s getting a third less of the air she should.
She swipes a claw quickly, but carefully, beneath the folds, trying to clear the passage.
Bigger pieces of that insidious inorganic matter come away, but the congestion isn’t clearing.
The more she focuses on it, the worse it gets, each inhalation catching in her chest. She gasps, panic rising.
She’s never had to think so hard about breathing before.
Why? Why? Why? Why?
If there was a greater deity to pray to, to plead for intercession, for mercy, she would lift all twenty of her limbs and beg.
But there is no greater power than the Goddess of the Sea, than herself.
She’s supposed to have all the answers. And she’s been doomed to slowly suffocate in her own home, helpless and lost, unable to save herself, let alone others.
She hastens her ascent toward the photic zone, desperate to escape the foul water. Maybe, just maybe, all this filth has sunk and settled and the uppermost level of the ocean remains free and clear. There must be cleaner patches above. This couldn’t be what her once-beautiful home has become.
The rapidly decreasing pressure makes her insides slosh around like goop. Uncomfortable, but normal. Some things remain the same—though sloshy insides provide little consolation.
The water, this nightmare, only gets worse.
Lady Leviathan thrashes her arms, attempting to swat the murkiness away, but it’s inescapable. Even swimming through a silt cloud feels cleaner and promises an end. No, no, no.
It’s been a few hundred years. That is nothing in all the billions she has lived.
How could so much change in so little time?
Awakening from past deep periods of sleep has often meant loss, yes, but it never left her feeling so alien and unsuited to the new world.
How in the hottest hydrothermal vents is she ever supposed to adapt to this?
An anguished cry above cuts through the noise, the filth, and the panic.
Lady Leviathan’s thrashing arms still.
It cries again.
Something is in greater need than her. If she can help this poor creature, whatever their predicament may be…Well, let one good thing come out of waking up to this nightmare.
Lady Leviathan continues her ascent, and as she does, the water begins to brighten, penetrated by surface light. Breathing gets easier, though she credits that to distraction rather than improved water quality.
Her hasty ascent leaves little time for her eyes to adjust to the sun’s piercing rays. So, at first, she doesn’t see it.
As she squints through the bright haze, the light reveals a new horror. One that makes her regret ever leaving the dark. Too terrible to be real, and yet there’s no ignoring the truth of it. The chill that steals over her is colder than a glacial current.
A graveyard of rotting sea creatures, suspended eerily in the water, frozen in motion, spreads out before her hundreds of fathoms wide and deep. Sharks, whales, sea turtles, seals, and various kinds of fish…
Death is indiscriminate in its reach. The water is foul here, reeking of suffering and despair as much as decomposing flesh. Her arms twitch helplessly at her sides, longing to comfort, needing to save, but these poor creatures are far beyond help, their lives needlessly stolen and wasted.
A surge of distress floods the water from something living. Whatever creature that’s been crying out is somewhere amid this nightmare. Lady Leviathan spies wriggling from the corner of her eye and swims toward it.
A mermaid.
She has sharp, angular facial features, chiseled cheekbones, and a maw full of long, thin fangs. The corners of her mouth extend from ear to ear, permanently lifted in a fearsome rictus. Anything caught between those rows of teeth would never escape.
A stem juts out from the center of the mermaid’s forehead, and from it a bulbous, lambent orb like that of an anglerfish. Fins fan out from her temples and the backs of her arms—those, too, are sharp and used for slashing anything stupid enough to try hunting merfolk.
Her tail is vertically oriented like a shark’s, with a hind fin shaped in the hard curve of a crescent moon.
Every inch of the mermaid’s anatomy signals that she is a fellow creature of the deep.
Not all merfolk are. Or they are to varying degrees, every variation a product of evolution and breeding with surface dwellers.
Lady Leviathan questions the wisdom of doing the latter but keeps the thought to herself and swims closer.