Chapter 2
Chapter
Two
Amountainous being has risen from the depths, and she wears a crown made of ship wreckage.
It’s an array of broken wooden masts, rigging, and sails—every bit a relic from the surface dwellers’ days of old.
Days Ianthe’s kin long for most desperately.
When the ocean was quieter, cleaner, and nets were easy to tear to shreds.
When surface dwellers were easier to catch.
And eat.
She thought for sure their net would kill her. The bloated, decomposing bodies of all those who came before were a constant, maddening reminder that in a few days’ time, she would be just as dead and rotted as the rest. Maybe she’s been spared that fate and the goddess will free her.
Ianthe stares in awe at the Twenty-Armed Goddess.
How she towers before her, all beauty and might.
Her shadow blots out the sun and shrouds Ianthe in the comfort of darkness.
Of home, the abyss. When the goddess moves, the currents shift.
Waves rise and fall above them. When the Twenty-Armed Goddess speaks, the ocean listens. Awaiting her command.
Her power, her presence, is just like the stories Ianthe’s foremother told her as a youngling while tucking her into their seaweed nest. How the goddess could summon ferocious storms to strike down the surface dwellers who pillaged the sea.
How she smashed and sank their ships. Freed the creatures caught in their nets.
Ianthe’s merfolk ancestors played in the monstrous waves the goddess made, laughing as lightning streaked across the sky. And they feasted well in her wake.
Protector. Provider. The age-old creature who inspires their bravery.
Before this moment, the largest being Ianthe’s ever seen up close was a tall-browed whale, the kind that dives into the deep to hunt squid.
The Twenty-Armed Goddess is at least three times its size, both a wonder and a terror to behold, and Ianthe is completely at her mercy.
This glorious creature could crush her in the palm of a hand.
Or pummel her to death with one of her great many tentacled arms. It would be all too easy, and there is nothing Ianthe can do to save herself.
All five of the goddess’s golden eyes fix on her.
It’s a heavy weight, the full breadth of that stare.
The need to flee engulfs Ianthe’s senses, eroding any story-time nostalgia she’s held since she was a youngling.
Mortal panic shoots pins and needles along her skin, and without thinking, she jerks against the netting.
Its wicked threads slice deeper into her flesh and she hisses at the sharp pain punctuated by salty sting.
Resilient to the ocean’s bite doesn’t mean unaffected.
“Goddess, that hurts,” Ianthe curses and immediately regrets it. Usually, the very being she swears on isn’t directly in front of her. Watching her like her next meal.
The goddess’s lips quirk in amusement. Five eyes as big as her head peer down at her—into her. It’s unnerving to garner so much attention from a creature who could easily devour her in two bites. “That’s an easy plea to answer. Stop wriggling.”
“Not if you’ll eat me, I won’t!”
Ianthe can take on a shark, maybe two, but not the Twenty-Armed Goddess herself. She’ll die trying, though, even if she only gets in a few swipes.
The ocean is a harsh mother. There’s no reason to think that one of its first daughters would be any gentler.
The net offered certain death—a fate Ianthe almost resigned herself to after the first three days trapped inside its web.
Death at the hands—or arms—of the kraken goddess seems like a mercy by comparison.
Glorious beauty. Power. Maybe a brief flash of pain, then sweet, blissful nothingness.
Death must be like sleep. It has to be. Ianthe can’t comprehend it as anything else.
The goddess is both a wonder and a terror to behold, and Ianthe is completely at her mercy.
But much to her surprise, it’s not Death Ianthe sees in the Twenty-Armed Goddess’s eyes.
It’s not hunger either. It’s worry and more tenderness than Ianthe knows what to do with.
It’s why she’s not seized in another wave of panic when the giant kraken woman’s clawed fingers curl loosely around her body, providing shelter.
More nest than snare. It’s a distinction Ianthe appreciates, and a relieved exhale of bubbles clouds the water in front of her face.
“You’re too precious to eat.”
Ianthe’s cheeks burn. Now the goddess is looking at her like she’s a prize.
Polished sea glass, colorful gems, glittering silver and gold coins, plucked from wreckage.
Deep-sea merfolk like to pretend they’re not swayed by shiny, pretty things like their counterparts who swim closer to the shore, but they collect the pretty things all the same.
She’s never been someone’s treasure before.
“I want to make it stop,” the goddess continues, plucking out a thread. “This hurt.”
Ianthe winces—the removal stings—but relief floods immediately after.
The gratification is worth the initial pain, and when she looks down at the slice across her abdomen, she’s grateful to see her skin is already stitching itself back together.
Wounds that don’t heal fast can poison and kill.
Surviving any number of perils only to succumb to injury later is a cruel, ruthless reality, and while it doesn’t claim her kind often, it’s not without precedent.
Propellers. Nets. Mishaps with jagged, rusty metal during dives for shipwreck salvage. Shark bites. Not all the dangers are manmade, but many of them are.
Keep going, she wants to say. It hurts, but it’s helping. She doesn’t though, because who is Ianthe to command the kraken goddess of the deep?
The goddess does not seem put off by Ianthe’s lack of response and plucks away another digging thread. Ianthe patiently endures the process—sharp pain, then relief—again and again. There’s nothing else to do but get through it.
She fits so neatly in the goddess’s palm, completely cradled. Only her tail dangles off the edge. It’s strangely comforting to be encompassed so fully. Snug and concealing like a small cave. A place for safety and reprieve.
It’s within the protection of this giant’s hand that she quietly observes the legendary being. Never in Ianthe’s wildest dreams had she ever thought the Twenty-Armed Goddess would return in her lifetime, much less to be rescued, held, and tended to by her.
Reality matches story in that the kraken goddess is massive, and yet none of the tales her foreparents told adequately prepares Ianthe for what she sees.
The goddess has four elbowed arms, two on each side on the uppermost part of her torso—arms like the two Ianthe has.
Each one ends in a clawed, five-fingered webbed hand.
Unlike the goddess’s other sixteen limbs, which are massive tentacles at least two whale-lengths long and lined with golden bioluminescent suckers.
While her skin is dark blue, the tentacles making up the lower half of her body are so dark they’re almost black.
If not for the bioluminescence that highlights the goddess’s form—from the gold of her eyes to the glowing freckles that line her cheeks and powerful limbs—Ianthe wouldn’t be able to see her at all, even with surface light filtering a hundred feet down to them.
Like many creatures of the deep, the goddess blends well into the ocean and can shutter her inner light if she chooses. Invisible until it’s too late.
Yet the fear Ianthe felt before is drifting beyond reach.
Every bioluminescent node along the kraken’s body shines brightly. Their sheer quantity and size create an aura of warm light that surrounds them both and illuminates the goddess’s long, inky hair. Ianthe watches how the strands swirl in the currents, mesmerized by their ethereal dance.
Maybe, just maybe, she wouldn’t mind being entangled in the goddess’s arms. Maybe that’s a snare she’d invite. It’s a stray, surprising thought.
It strikes her then that this is all too wondrous to be real. The Twenty-Armed Goddess herself? It can’t be so. There’s grimmer, far more likelier explanations.
“Is this a dream?” Ianthe whispers. Afraid it will become true if she voices it too loud. Even quieter, she asks, “Or the hereinafter? Have I died?”
Maybe she never made it out of the net…Maybe this beautiful and terrifying vision before her is actually Death himself welcoming her into the afterlife with a pretty guise, and she’ll never see her pod, her foremother, again.
A strange burning sensation wells around Ianthe’s eyes and lodges in her throat.
Surprise flickers across all five of the goddess’s golden eyes as she looks up from her task. “No, little one. You lived.” She brings a tentacle to Ianthe’s cheek with the softest, barest touch. “As long as I am here, you are not Death’s to claim.”
The goddess’s caress. The weight of her eyes. The grand, wide ocean narrowing to this one singular point. Just the two of them and nothing else. You are mine. This piece of the promise isn’t spoken, but it’s felt all the same.
Ianthe relaxes into the kraken goddess’s embrace.
With careful precision, Lady Leviathan shears away the net pieces digging into Ianthe’s gray pearlescent skin, carefully and gently picking them out of her wounds.
Blood clouds the water with each vicious strand removed. She hates causing the mermaid more pain but is grateful for how completely Ianthe holds still. Their vast size difference makes this extraction slow, delicate work. One wrong move and she could hurt rather than help.
Lady Leviathan purses her lips in concentration and collects all the shorn scraps of netting in a ball that she keeps behind her so she can bury it later, deep in the sea floor.
As much as she doesn’t want the cruel instrument anywhere in her ocean, even in the muck, it’s a better solution than leaving it drifting about, continuing to ruthlessly ensnare.