SSCS 02: Installment 13 of 32
How to Catch Flying Pigs, and Sea Monsters
This is Installment 13 of this year’s SSCS. If you want to start at the beginning of ‘How to Catch Flying Pigs, and Sea Monsters’, go here! If you want to know what the heck an SSCS is, go here!
Previously…
A bit like gran-Tom’s – probably the only feature where Mina matched gran-Tom, who was scaly and tentacley and clawed – something mostly from the sea. But maybe she’d been forced to wear stupid steel-pig-hide gloves when she was younger, too. Maybe that was why she so happily inflicted them on Mina now, to get that turn-about satisfaction. Mina gnashed her teeth just thinking about it.
And nearly stepped on the first oyster bell she came across.
…How to Catch Flying Pigs, and Sea Monsters
Installment 13: 20.0108
Teetering on the sharp rocks, Mina bent down to inspect the flower. Gran-Tom might have said oyster bells would do for now, but what she meant was oyster bells that had only just started blooming. If they had been open for too many days, all their fragrance would have been scoured away by the sea-air by now. Holy tea without any fragrance (roses or oyster bells or whatever) simply wasn’t – this Mina had learned the hard way, over too many instances for anyone to ever label her ‘wise’. But she was old enough and wise enough now to at least know she didn’t want to be sent back down the spire a second time in one day.
This flower would do, though. Mina thought the older flowers were prettier – as much as oyster bells could be pretty. They had silver-grey scruff for leaves that blended right into the rocks, but the petals edged toward a thin, translucent purple as they aged. This one didn’t show any purple, the petals still so firm and black as to be almost shiny. Mina snipped it off with the tips of her gloves and let it fall into her basket. One flower down, about fifty more to go.
Which would have been bad enough. Would have been plenty bad enough. Yet…
Straightening from her awkward crouch and looking up, Mina’s heart just about climbed up her throat and leapt out of it. Instead of that, what came out was an undignified yelp, as Mina pinwheeled her arms wildly, recovering her balance only just soon enough not to fall. Meanwhile, her knees quivered with the urge to run, stopped only by the immutable fact that one cannot run on spire boulders. But oh she very much wanted to. Because poking around the side of the next wall-boulder in her path were two of the kraken’s eye stalks, one of them giving a strange, lazy blink. Hence, Mina was confronted with the second reason why her chore today was going to take much longer than Hedwin and gran-Tom’s.
Almost as soon as she saw them, but after the weird half-blink, the eyes pulled back out of sight, like some naughty child caught poking around somewhere it wasn’t supposed to. Mina just stood there, her heart hammering, with no idea at all what to do. She could turn around and try to come at the oyster bells from the other side. But the kraken – which could fly! – was way faster than her clutching, stumbling pace on these boulders. She could try to hide somewhere until it left, but she couldn’t even see where it was now, and if she waited too long the tide would start to come back up and make fetching the oyster bells far too treacherous to be viable.
She could leave without the oyster bells, but then she’d probably have the Other One to contend with.
Heart still beating so hard it made a rushing sound in her ears, Mina slowly edged forward. When she got to the edge of the boulder in question, she saw another clump of oyster bells, a couple turning purple but more than a handful of shiny, black flowers, tucked tight into a crevice midway up the rock-face. Cautiously, she stretched to reach for them, her right side feeling cold and exposed, facing the direction the kraken might come from.
She clipped the flowers, one, two, …five, …. Before she could get to the sixth, a quiet, horrible sound reached her, like iron nails dragging along the side of an iron drum. Flinching back but trying to hold still, Mina risked a peek to her right. There were the kraken eye-stalks again peering around the boulder, a second one coming into view as she watched, and then a third. They blinked at her again, two of them, out of sync, then whipped away out of sight. Holding still another moment, Mina caught sight of movement near her feet, and looked down to see one silvery, purpley, half-translucent tentacle also drawing back behind the boulder, as though being extra stealthy.
And what in the fucking, pig-riddled, slime-drenched, purple, foggy kraken pits was she supposed to do in the face of that?