She also noticed the creatures that failed to stay low were smashed and riven by the crest of the waves. Their diaphanous, lifeless remains cluttering the sand in the wake of retreating surf.
Struck by the parallels to the peril the sisters face now, Mat-o-Peia knows instantly what they must do.
“To the paddles, quickly,” she shouts. “We must head directly into the approaching wall as fast as our strokes will carry us!”
This time, there is no hesitation. No questioning. Steering their craft toward the towering curtain of sea, the seven sisters paddle furiously. Directly into its black depth.
Their course is marked by the sudden appearance of a ribbon of phosphorescence, splashing across the surface of the sea, toward the approaching wall of water.
Withdrawing their paddles, the sisters take frantic gulps of breath just as they break into the wall and are swallowed in its airless depth.
The submerged craft rolls over and over. Pulled and tossed this way and that by irresistible forces propelling the tsunami. Clinging to the structural poles and enveloping fiber of the craft, the sisters ride the monster like a wrangler locked onto the horns of a raging brahma bull.
Only these wranglers cannot breathe.
They enter the seismic wall of water at its base, many fathoms below its towering crest, and the sisters’ survival is dependent on the buoyant properties of the wicker craft.
Will it float up to the surface far above before they drown?
Vaulting upward, they leave the black pelagic depth and rise into a glowing medium alive with phosphorescent creatures so minuscule they are visible only by the light they emit. The compartment of the submerged craft is aglow with the light.
Revealing every object in its place and the proximity of every sister.
Quick-thinking Mat-o-Peia reacts instinctively to increase their odds and, clutching the edge of the hatch with one hand, she begins jettisoning every solid object within reach.
It is not much. But it is enough.
Soon the craft surges to the surface amid the gagging and coughing of seven soaked and soggy surviving sisters.
Mei-o-Peia is first to speak: “That was a near thing and I, for one, feel as if I actually drowned and am now come back to life. I still taste the sea water.
“Mat-o now joins On-o as two who have met the silver maiden’s tests. We are five to go, and the challenges will grow harder. Although I cannot imagine what can be more formidable than the shadow-monster and the great wall of ocean.”
As the tsunami’s roar recedes, the sisters inventory the contents of the craft to make sure nothing essential has been lost. An-o-Peia takes charge, making sure all their equipment is accounted for and restored to its proper place.
Fortunately, only a few non-essential items are missing. Jettisoned by Mat-o-Peia in the race to regain the surface air.
It is a wet, bedraggled, exhausted crew that falls out for sleep this night. As their craft resumes its slow journey. Propelled by the gentle current that embraces it.
The next leg of their journey is an uneventful voyage of many days and many nights. A voyage away from the two rising suns that greet each new morn. A voyage requiring no effort from the crew of the drifting craft.
While the days are warm and enervating, each night brings a coolness that energizes the sisters into long, wistful reflections on what has befallen them and into expectant, thoughtful speculation about what is yet to come.
Parsing every syllable of the night visitor’s message, they search for every bit of meaning, open and hidden.
While their immediate concern is for the trials of the sea which are yet to come, their greater wonder attaches to the Earth Spirit’s prophecy assigning them a role in renewing the world.
What does that mean?
The sisters are blissfully unaware the seismic event that unleashed the global tsunami awakened another monster from the depths of hell. An enormous creature driven from its lair on the abyssal plain far, far below the surface of the sea.
Chapter 6. Out of the Abyss
The mistress of this hadopelagic realm is a tentacled colossus whose limitless appetite is fed by every organic thing, living and dead, on the deep ocean bottom.
Whose immense bulk is replenished daily by a massive die-out of micro-organisms raining down from the margins of the oceanic currents, where contact with the carbon-rich dead zone takes an endless toll between every rising and setting of the suns. By a diet made richer in reaching out with long tentacles to ensnare bigger prey--the hapless demersal creatures unwise enough to journey down into her grasp.
Anchored to the ocean floor by bonds of mucilage she has secreted into the bedrock. Held there by the terrific pressures in this deepest well of the planet. Pressures caused by the crushing weight of countless fathoms of water pressing down on her.
Aroused from her benthic bedchamber, the queen of the abyssal plain is suddenly unchained as the deep ocean floor imprisoning her is riven by seismic rents.
Adrift in the still depths at the bottom of the sea, she rises!
Undergoing dramatic transformation as she passes through the ever-falling pressure. Pressure that holds her down no longer. Pressure that releases her upward toward the harsh intensity of two suns.
The creature’s enormous bulk looms progressively larger as she rises through the intermediate pressures in the mesopelagic gloom. Reaching prodigious proportions in the anemic pressure of the euphotic shallows nearer the ocean surface.
As her size balloons, her shape shifts . . . and continues to shift as her ponderous mass finds no firm purchase in her expanded casement of soft, fluid ectoplasm.
Even her vast tentacles, arms that grasped unwary creatures in an embrace of death on the abyssal plain, are losing their strength. While they still have movement, their grip is greatly weakened.
It is when she reaches the surface that the final transformation occurs. Barely visible but overwhelmingly lethal. Scorched by the suns’ caustic rays, the beast bleeds acid!
Only her tentacles remain free of the toxic sweat. No acid bleeds from their oily skin.
The creature bodily respirates the very lifeblood of her digestive tract. A loss that dooms her to slow starvation in this open, sunlit world.
But fate, in a more dire form, will shortly intervene.
∆ ∆ ∆
Rising early to begin harvesting the school of silver fish that gathered around the craft during the night, Lin-o-Peia approaches the fore hatch, lance in hand, and pulls aside its flap. She is startled by the unexpected scene that greets her.
There in the offing is a mound-shaped island stretched across what was bare, empty ocean the day before. While her heart rejoices at the sight of terra firma, there is something odd about its appearance.
It is preternaturally symmetrical and smooth. Devoid of any tree-line or other topographic feature. And its surface is oddly pale and luminescent.
It reminds her of the soft, dead tissue of the diaphanous creatures that dwelt in the lagoon at the foot of the cone-mountains.
What she cannot see are the enormous tentacles lurking beneath the waves washing up the sides of this mysterious land mass.
The creature is caught in the confluence of two currents streaming across one another. Creating a static zone of offsetting forces where they intersect.
The same forces have joined to generate a powerful, noisily sucking maelstrom. Hidden from Lin-o-Peia’s view by the enormous bulk of the titan she mistakes for land.
While she cannot see it, her sisters are soon awakened by the mounting crescendo of growling, gnashing, guttural sounds of the sea rushing into the vortex of the racing whirlpool.
Reminded of the cataracts crashing down from the heights of the cone-mountains, they merely suspect there are similar waterfalls hidden somewhere in the recesses of this bare, lifeless island. And so they deploy the oars to speed them along the current propelling them toward the unexpected land.
But the closer they dra
w, the more puzzled they become by its strange and eerie landscape. An-o-Peia is first to notice the oozing liquid bubbling on its surface.
As the sisters track the wispy substance streaming off the side of the mound, they notice the smoking carcasses of fish dissolving in the waters at its shore. So intent are they on the drama unfolding on the shore they fail to see the thick, gnarled tentacles uncoiling in the sea beneath them.
Alarmed, Sei-o-Peia cries out:
“Quick, sisters. Grab the oars. We must leave this island of death!”
As the fifth-born, she knows this trial is hers. And she means to put a safe distance between the wicker craft and the lethal shore it is approaching.
It is too late!
Already, the far-reaching tentacles are arching upward out of the depth to ensnare the craft in their serpentine coils. But the enervated, compromised creature has not the strength to draw the craft under.
Leaping to the hatch, Sei-o-Peia begins hacking at the closest tentacle and, as its grip relaxes, calls to her sisters:
“Grab lances and help me!”
Seven probing, piercing lances soon dislodge the tentacles and, as soon as the craft is freed, Sei-o-Peia urges the sisters to paddle toward the opposite side of the island. Away from the grasping arms under the sea.
But like an obstinate curse, the tentacles pursue the craft as it emerges into the angry sea on the far side of the mound.
Spotting the vast whirlpool, Sei-o-Peia seizes the opportunity and immediately calls on the sisters to paddle toward the rim of the vortex.
Suddenly, the sea glows as a stream of luminescence beckons the craft in the direction it travels.
Reassured, Sei-o-Peia urges her sisters on along the silvery, pulsating track toward the eddy’s rim.
The great maelstrom spins counter-clockwise, and Sei-o-Peia means to draw the pursuing tentacles into its embrace while diverting their small craft to one side.
What she does not know is how the mound-island is reacting!
The massive creature is slowly revolving and, like its tentacles, seems to be stalking the small craft.
But the fifth sister is intent on the more immediate threat. On avoiding being drawn into the whirlpool while luring the tentacles into its swirling maw. Unconcerned for the moment about the behavior or fate of the island behind them.
Touching the outer rim of the maelstrom, she tells the sisters to steer away, using their oars to create drag. And the craft nimbly shoots away from the sucking cone of sea.
Not so the tentacles!
The weakened, bulky appendages are seized at once by the overpowering centripetal force.
Looking on from a distance, the sisters are mesmerized by the spectacle of the mound-island inexorably following the tentacles into the maelstrom. Of the tearing and rending into huge shards of flesh, diced and minced in the swirling blender at the eddy’s core.
It is in this final act of destruction that the sisters realize the mound-island was in fact alive. A creature so immense it rivaled their own island of cone-mountains.
What they do not realize is the maelstrom reaches to the very bottom of the sea. Returning the beast to the hellish depths whence it came.
The sisters spend the rest of this day regaining the current that bears them ever westward.
Beyond the perpendicular flow of the great cross-current.
Beyond the dead zone.
Beyond the devouring maelstrom.
Far, far beyond.
When the two suns quit the sky and blackness thickens, the exhausted crew repair to their berths and sink into the somnolent solace of profound sleep on a calm, silent sea silvered in starlight.
The same starlight that awakens a stealthy night hunter which, despite its great size, stirs barely a ripple as it rises from a following sea.
Chapter 7. Night-Stalker
The creature is first cousin to the giant skate the sisters encountered in their first trial on this primal ocean. Similar in size and nearly identical in appearance. Yet, more sinister.
Unlike that eyeless filter-feeder concealed in shadow, this monster is keen-eyed and carnivorous. And while it lurks in hidden repose beneath the diurnal sea, it breaches the night waves with the gift of flight.
It is the great blue skimmer-ray, the ocean’s most deadly solitary surface hunter. And it feeds on whatever luckless creatures it finds.
This blue ray is many leagues from the sleeping sisters, but it follows the same current it knows will yield a rich harvest of marine life. It skims effortlessly on silent wings. Occasionally dipping beneath the surface to seize prey with its razor-edge beak.
The harpoon-like beak is the instrument of the skimmer-ray’s ruthless versatility, serving both as a skewer of slippery, slithery life-forms and as a slicer of their thick, scaly skin, flesh and bone. Once impaled, there is no escape for its prey.
∆ ∆ ∆
The wicker craft continues to ride the westward current as the sisters perform the daily chores necessary for survival on this savage sea. As the silver fish are plentiful, supplemented by occasional beds of nutritious kelp, and the night rains frequent, they settle into a comfortable routine of harvesting the sea and collecting rainwater in the improvised gourds.
The monotony of the featureless ocean depresses them greatly. They wonder if they ever will see real land again.
Only Mei-o-Peia overcomes the melancholia. Chasing it away with thoughts of what lies far ahead. The prize that awaits the sisters if they survive the seven deadly perils. Confident the Earth Spirit will protect and guide them to the unknown destiny she foretold.
Instead of dreading the empty ocean, she turns her thoughts to the Earth Spirit’s words and prophecy. And she comes to some remarkable conclusions.
It seems clear that, despite the destruction of their island of cone-mountains, she and her sisters are not alone in this world. That there are others like themselves. And that those others include males.
Else, how could the sisters, alone, bring forth the new race the Earth Spirit prophesied? For they are all females.
While she does not shrink from a destiny foretold, she dreads the rutting ritual that must accompany it.
The eldest sister also infers that their destination is the greatest island in the world. Nothing less will serve if, as the Earth Spirit predicts, they will remake that world.
Surely, the most sublime purpose must be performed on the grandest stage. Not trivial or isolated in scope or effect.
For her part, An-o-Peia keeps sharp vigil on the sea around them. Wondering what monster she will face when her turn comes next.
Nor does she have long to wait. As the giant skimmer-ray races along the great current bearing the frail craft across the trackless sea.
The darkness arrives early this day as gray squalls of lashing rain hurry from the south and pummel the wicker skin with pelting shards of hail. Even the great ray, drawn aloft by the disappearance of two suns, retreats again beneath the waves to escape the fury of the raging storm.
But the violence stops as suddenly as it began. Drawing back its curtain of darkness. Surrendering the late afternoon sky once more to the light of two suns. And the giant carnivore keeps its station beneath the waves as the great current carries it along. Bringing it ever closer to the wicker craft.
Standing her watch in the deepening night, An-o-Peia is bathed in the silver glow of a starlit sky. Peering through the open aft hatch, she is mesmerized by the shimmering beauty of starlight dancing on the calm waves of an endless ocean. Tracing its dreamlike display across sea and sky, she is suspended in an infinity of ebon and silver clarity.
The spell is broken by a dawning realization that a ribbon of phosphorescence has intruded on the surface of the otherwise unbroken carpet of starlight reflected on the starboard quarter of the sea. Leading directly away from the craft. Toward a sudden wide rippling in the water’s surface. Off in the distance.
“Awake, sisters!” she cries. “The Silver Maiden bec
kons us again. Danger is afoot, and we must heed her call to follow the starboard tack.”
As the sisters turn the craft, lashing the flanged-oar rudder to the starboard course, it glides nimbly onto the ribbon of phosphorescence. As the current propels them steadily in its wake.
At once, they take up spears and muster at the fore hatch. Ready to repel any assault upon their frail craft.
That is when the rippling surface ahead is broken by the slick, scaly back of the greatest behemoth that prowls this savage sea!
It is the megalodon of this world.
Whose immense size dwarfs that of all animated creatures, save only the tentacled colossus that made its home on the deep ocean floor. But that queen of the hadopelagic abyss has only once ever left her realm and is no more.
Leaving megalodon unrivaled at the top of the food chain. Supreme apex predator. Undisputed lord of the ocean sea.
So vast is its bulk, so awesome its crushing jaws and so mighty its boundless strength that the leviathan eschews the great streams and currents that confine the lesser creatures of its domain. Preferring instead to bask in the placid, lifeless stretches of ocean. Crisscrossing the currents only to harvest the largest beasts that dwell there.
Appalled by the immensity of the monster they are approaching, the younger sisters appeal to Mat-o-Peia to turn back. But the eldest sister demurs, counseling them to stay the course.
“An-o-Peia will guide us”, Mei-o-Peia insists, “and the phosporescent trail reveals she is guiding us true.” As the craft races toward the mountain of terror that is the savage sea’s supreme predator.
Meanwhile, blinded by their failure to keep lookout at the aft hatch, they are unaware death approaches on silent wings behind them. As the giant skimmer-ray homes in on its hapless prey.
But just as the sisters fail to detect the swift pursuit of the menace aft, it, too, is blind to the greater threat beyond. Fixated on its quarry, the ray does not perceive the presence of the megalodon directly ahead of it.
Eos Rising: The Third Book of Regenesis Page 4