Suddenly, the phosphorescent trail turns sharply, and An-o-Peia leaps back to the rudder to steer the craft onto the new course. Abandoning the great current to enter the calm stretch of greater ocean.
At that instant, with the veil of the small craft’s detracting motion gone, the leviathan espies the skimmer-ray. And before the silent flier can veer away, the megalodon breaches. Catching the ray in its yawning jaws. Crushing it and carrying the struggling creature down to the blackest depths of the leviathan’s lifeless ocean realm.
So great is the surface displacement created by the monster’s sudden dive, it draws the frail craft toward the whirlpool of its wake. But An-o-Peia had sensed the danger, ere it happened, and had flanged poles at the ready.
Thus prepared, the sisters quickly paddle the wicker craft away from the suction of the swirling eddy. Back into the gentle force of the current.
As peace returns to the starlit sea.
Chapter 8. Typhoon
The exhausted sisters sleep as their frail craft drifts listlessly and is becalmed in the dead water beyond the current. When they awake, they will face a stillness of sea and sky beyond their experience:
The mid-oceanic doldrums!
Their narrow escape from the skimmer-ray has left them marooned in the inter-tropical convergence zone, whose windless wastes they will not escape by dint of their labor alone.
Em-o-Peia is first to rise, and to experience the utter absence of the frail craft’s motion. As twin suns edge slowly upward on the far horizon.
Soon, the other sisters join her—all wondering what it means.
“It means we have lost the current,” she explains, “and we are becalmed in lifeless waters. There is no sign of fish about the craft, and we must have food to survive. We have provisions enough for only a few days. Then, all our stored fruits and dried fish will be spent.”
The sisters quickly agree on the urgency to regain the great current, where life abounds. But none can divine the direction in which it lies.
“This peril falls to me,” Em-o-Peia acknowledges, “and so I will take the rudder. Perhaps when night falls, we will have a trail of phosphorescence to guide us aright.”
She could not be more mistaken!
This is not the peril the Earth Spirit has in store for her. Nor will the phosphorescent trail appear this night, or any other, so long as they remain becalmed.
The suns rise and the suns fall twice more before the sisters tire of their inaction and, once again, take up oars and begin paddling in a direction they hope is true.
They are halfway through the third day when disaster strikes!
That is when mid-day turns suddenly to mid-night. As total darkness creeps across the ocean to engulf the small craft.
The air turns heavy, the sisters’ breathing labored. And an anechoic silence surrounds them like the voiceless echo of a tomb.
Em-o-Peia is first to grasp the dire warning of the cataclysm to come.
While the doldrums are new to her experience, these signs are not. And she knows what will follow.
“Quick,” she calls out in alarm. “Batten down every loose object. Secure the hatches fore and aft. And fashion tethers to anchor yourselves to the elevated ribs of the craft.
“The storm will be upon us soon, and we will have to ride it out. I have a plan to take us to the other side of the storm, but we have to prepare now if we are to survive long enough to reach it.”
With that, the sisters scurry about the craft, tying down every loose thing. They quickly improvise tethers, which they secure to the structure of the craft at one end, leaving an open noose at the other to fit their wrists. Scarcely are they done when the storm strikes.
It is a typhoon!
Much like the most violent storms that struck their island home. But this time, the sisters have no caves to shelter in. No refuge at all.
They are caught in the open in the maw of the savage sea’s most destructive force. And Em-o-Peia has to find a way through.
A great mass of towering clouds sweeps down on the craft.
Venting all its energy-charged fury on this lone occupant of the surface-sea, the typhoon seems intent on punishing the interloper for its impudence. The storm claps down towering waves that swallow and vomit the wicker craft out onto great roiling swells of surging sea.
The very air itself is electric. With snapping, sizzling bolts of fire.
As the elemental forces tear at the wicker skin with grasping swipes of whiplash wind.
It is a vengeful, ripping, rending monster pouring all of its malevolence into the crashing sea and the bobbing object it seeks to destroy. Hour upon hour, the calamity clashes and roars.
Yet, the frail craft holds!
The sisters, lashing themselves to its supple ribs, persevere. Daunted but not defeated.
Until, even more suddenly than it began, the storm pauses. And the raging wall of fury draws slowly away.
That is when Em-o-Peia springs to action.
Handing out the flanged poles, she urges her sisters to paddle the craft toward the retreating wall of lightning-streaked cloud. Then, as if to affirm her choice, a ribbon of phosphorescence lances out in its direction.
Following the star-like path into the eye of the storm, they paddle for only a short while when the outline of land ahead emerges from the retreating wall of typhoon.
Soon, the sisters are hauling the wicker craft onto the shore and into thick forest. Where they tie it down to anchor it against the trailing storm they know is fast approaching.
Then, Em-o-Peia plunges into ever denser forest. Toward a high ridge visible above the trees. Arriving at an escarpment pocked with the shadowy mouths of many caves.
She urges her sisters upward to an elevated ledge and into a cave high upon the face of the escarpment. There, they fall out, exhausted, and rest their weary limbs.
Not for long!
Soon, they are shaken by the roar of shrieking wind, the crackle of intense lightning and the crash of falling trees. As the backside of the typhoon thunders across the land.
Even the sea conspires to wipe away the forest as it rises in prodigious waves that crash against the exposed base of the escarpment beneath the elevated ledge.
Meantime, the sisters remain high, dry and protected in their cave. And shortly, even the howling typhoon cannot keep them from the deep sleep of extreme exhaustion.
Hours later, they awaken to a bright new world. Fresh-scrubbed and glistening.
Hefting their long lances and descending to the forest floor, they pick their way among fallen trees. Finding many nutritious fruits among the scatter.
Making their way back to the beach, they find a badly damaged craft, sorely in need of repair before it will again be seaworthy.
But there are plenty of reeds and serviceable wood about, and the sisters resolve to rebuild their craft with light and hopeful hearts.
What they cannot know is that they have landed on a barb-shaped island. The southernmost tip of an archipelago whose string of smaller islands sweeps like a fishook into the mouth of a great bay. And that this largest island in the string is the lair of an amphibious goliath more lethal than the leviathans of the ocean’s deep!
Meantime, many leagues to the west, on the coastal plain of a vast supercontinent the sisters could scarce imagine, the leading edge of the typhoon is making landfall.
Sweeping across the watery bogs of the open plain toward seven other unsuspecting souls.
Chapter 9. The Quest
Awakened by the warming caress of two rising suns, the Great Northern Fens are vibrant with the symphony of life.
The deep-thoated chorus of creatures suspended between earth and water.
The thrumming tympany of climbers clinging to grassy stalks.
The lilting soprano of diaphanous flyers singing unseen.
Nature’s voices, rising to greet the new day.
And among them all, seven silent figures threading their way, Indian file, alon
g the stretches of dry ground that rise above the watery bog. Reaching ever southward like endless fingers pointing a true path.
All the figures wear black beards and little else, save for the breechclouts covering their loins. All are tall and well-muscled, their skin bronzed by long exposure to two suns. And all carry long, flexible poles finely balanced by razor-sharp spear-points at both ends.
They are the grown sons of Noah and Davina. Sharing their father’s physical likeness and their mother’s psychic gifts—clairvoyance and fluency in all languages of reason. But her gifts are lost on this terrain of vast, open marshland where no other creatures of reason dwell.
It is a wild and treacherous swampland, and the brothers continue to trek southward into an unknown world. Beyond the farthest frontier of any previous journey.
In the lead, Adam reflects on the events that brought them to this far place and on this quest to a future destination farther still.
Like so many inflection points in lives robustly lived, it began with a seemingly innocent, offhand remark of the middle brother who, despite his physical maturity, was still feeling his way. Groping for the answers that confer wisdom and manhood in their lives.
“Father,” Japheth asked Noah on an earlier expedition to the fens, “what became of Mother’s people?”
This simple question launched a quest that will remake their world. That will enable and ensure the future of their kind.
“Mother’s people are gone,” Noah answered frankly.
“All life in their polar region must have perished during the great cataclysm when Mother and I crossed the world to get to this auspicious shore we call home. Their fate was sealed in that epochal event, and they are no more.
“We alone survived.
“Crossing the watery and arid lands alike, from the transantarctic alps, into the equatorial rainforest, through the great rift valley, across the endless sea of pampas, into the high desert, to this temperate place.
“Like Mother, I thank the Earth Spirit for sparing us. And we are confident our survival serves some greater purpose. Though we cannot divine what it is. But this much we know:
“You and your brothers will be the inheritors of this new world. And your fate is intertwined with, and central to, the great purpose the Earth Spirit holds in store for all living things.”
Not one to leave fate to others, Earth Spirit or no, Japheth conferred with Adam and the other brothers to determine what actions they might take to hasten and help shape that future. They quickly dismissed any thought of attempting to reach the southern polar region, where no life was thought to exist, or trekking through the inland regions already crossed by Noah and Davina.
Instead, they resolved to plunge directly south, and the route they devised brought them to this remote wilderness, at this time. Determined to explore the unknown coastal region, beyond the Great Northern Fens, in search of others of their kind.
The seven brothers had bivouacked on a raised hammock of dry sand. Near a scatter of large boulders forming a kopje, rising from a depression of a few feet to a height several feet above the level ground of the hammock. Near the spreading fronds of a low, wind-stunted tree on its westward side.
Adam is first to awaken. Thrilled at the clarity of the rising suns and the growing resonance of nature’s calls, sweet and shrill.
Filled with optimism, he marks the lessening of the breeze to gentle zephyrs as he welcomes the bright rays of a day he is confident will speed their passage through the gathering calm.
He could not be more mistaken!
As the other brothers stir awake, Adam wonders at a sudden drop in air movement. At the same time, he sees a black mist rolling upward on the horizon. A mist that swallows the two suns, turning day into night on the Great Northern Fens.
The brothers gaze toward the lost horizon. Wondering what is causing this remarkable change. A change beyond their experience.
Japheth is the first to sound the alarm.
While he does not know what the preternatural darkness portends, he senses danger in the air around them. As it thickens, becoming so close it makes breathing difficult. And the darkness deepens to a blackness so profound it blots out all features beyond the sandy mound they encamped upon.
“Quick!” Japheth cries. “We need to push some of these boulders to form a rampart from the tree, as its anchor, to the kopje on both sides. The kopje provides shelter to the east, but not from other directions. Let’s fortify our position while we can.”
With that, the brothers attack the large boulders with zeal. Pushing, pulling, shoving and manhandling them in place to form makeshift ramparts running from the tree to the kopje. A triangular fortification bridging the depression at the kopje’s base on both sides.
Scarcely is the final boulder wedged into place when the blast strikes. It is a shrieking, lashing monster sweeping the fens with unbridled fury.
The seven brothers huddle together behind their stone fortification while the typhoon wreaks its vengeance on the world around them—earth, water and sky.
There are few trees in the fens, and the unabated wind scours the land. Beating ferns and grasses flat. Whipping sand and stone into open waterways. Scooping water from shallow pools.
Changing earth to water and water to earth as it remakes the topography of the fens.
Thanks to Japheth’s quick thinking and his brothers’ herculean efforts, they are sheltered from the brunt of the tempest. Indeed, the only discomfort they suffer is from the sheets of rain. But they are driven down by an east wind at an angle largely repulsed by the high kopje, and the brothers are used to the dampness of rain-squalls from their previous forays into the fens.
Bronze skin easily sheds raindrops, and soaked breechclouts will dry in minutes beneath two burning suns.
But it is many hours before the suns return.
Hours of darkness broken only by a pulsating web of streaked lightning that strobes, snaps and lashes like silver whips across the black mist of sky.
Hours of sheltering-in-place against pummeling sheets of rain that quickly fill the shallow depression nearly waist-high between tree and kopje.
Hours of watching the waters of the fens rise all around the raised hammock. Threatening to flood the sandy mound and wash it away.
Hours of uncertainty for seven who have never experienced a typhoon and cannot know its duration or lethality.
At long last, just as suddenly as it started, the rain stops and light begins to climb the eastern horizon like the lifting of a black curtain.
It is the work of but a few hours for the sky to clear under the brilliant light of two suns directly overhead.
Like the dawn when the typhoon struck, earth, water and sky assume crystal clarity in the clean, crisp air. And just as before, all the creatures of the marshland sing their praise to this new day.
But the twin suns look down upon a dramatically altered landscape.
The rising water has obliterated many of the narrow spits of firm earth. Leaving the seven brothers stranded on the raised hammock with but one route of escape. It is the only visible solid ground near the hammock and, fortuitously, it lances southward across the flooded bog.
Adam leads the brothers out of the hammock, turning south to follow the dry path wherever it may lead. The day’s walk brings high hopes to the travelers as they observe the flood-water gradually begin to recede while patches of firm earth are re-emerging all around them.
By the time night arrives, the fens have regained much of their former, tenuous but navigable character.
What the brothers fail to see is the deeper, mist-like darkness beginning to ascend the eastern horizon just as night is falling.
Adam alone wonders at the more tangible blackness in the distance. But dismisses it as a product of the over-active imagination of an exhausted traveler or some distant natural phenomenon spawned by the storm that has passed.
Thus are the brothers oblivious to the impending doom that will descend upon
them, unsuspected, when they sleep exposed on the open pathway!
While across the eastern sea, evil creeps steadily ashore. Threatening to envelop seven sisters. Pursued by greater evil still!
Chapter 10. The Maze-Herder
The sisters devote the following day to a thorough examination of the wreckage of the wicker craft.
Cast upon this unfamiliar shore, they are intent on quickly repairing the vessel and resuming their quest against future perils they cannot imagine. They share a deep sense of their appointment with destiny and know they cannot keep that appointment until they complete the remaining trials of the sea.
What they cannot know is that same destiny has brought them to this barb island for the next challenge in their quest.
Painstakingly probing, examining and testing the integrity of every structural feature of the wicker craft, they are distracted and unaware of the darkness emerging from the surf.
Washing across the white sand in a spreading stain. Cutting off retreat in the direction of the caves.
Lin-o-Peia is the first to notice the strange phenomenon, and the sisters are mesmerized by its throbbing motion.
It is as if the surf is sending dark wavelets over the dry sand. But as they watch in fascination, the same blackness emerges across the beach in the other direction. Pinning them between a dense fringe of forest and the open sea.
As the dark mass edges closer, the sisters discern its multitudinous uniformity of tightly packed black, wriggling monstrosities. As the appalling amphibious creatures crawl toward the wicker craft, they set upon the trampled forms of their brethren. Rending their flesh in a cannibal frenzy of lethal snapping jaws.
Horrified by the carnage and the irresistible approach of the writhing horde, the sisters search vainly for an avenue of escape. As they look to the surf, more of the monsters begin pouring onto the sand directly across from the craft.
As the last of the black creatures emerges from the surf, a giant breaches the waves behind them.
Eos Rising: The Third Book of Regenesis Page 5