SSCS 02: Installment 15 of 32
How to Catch Flying Pigs, and Sea Monsters
This is Installment 15 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…
(And never mind that when Hedwin ate flying fruit he really did bob around, like the steering mechanism for up and down was something well outside the realm of his control. But then, even the pigs had gotten enough the hang of things to get absolutely everywhere on the spire – as evidenced by the sudden, ubiquitous presence of their shit. Maybe it really was just people who were incompetent fliers.)
…How to Catch Flying Pigs, and Sea Monsters
Installment 15: 20.0219
So the morning wore on. The kraken peeked around the edges of boulders at her, or up from under the waves, or down from above. And it shrieked just enough, and snaked its tentacles around just enough that Mina’s skin finally felt like it was ready to just jump right off her bones! And Mina basically had no choice but to keep on gathering oyster bells. Even when the fragrance from the lot she’d gathered in her basket got to be so strong her eyes were watering, there seemed to be little point in trying to do anything but move forward, just circle the damned spire and get back to the stairs leading up that way.
There was one, teeny, tiny bit of the morning that made the rest of the awful a smidgen bit better. Coming around the bend of one boulder, feet and hands aching from navigating the sharp rocks, face dripping from the awful stink of far too many oyster bells, Mina looked up to see what looked like some sort of an angry spot in the rocks just ahead. Except, of course, it wasn’t an angry spot, and not just because rocks don’t get angry. It was just that it was so yellow it was positively glowing with it. But that turned out to be because there was something growing there, another (though still-mostly-smallish) rose vine, which had sprouted down here amongst the sharp rocks and salt spray, of all places. Its flowers were yellow (obviously) instead of pink, and it was absolutely smothered in them.
And Mina wasn’t going to pick a singled, damned one of them! Even though it turned out that they smelled completely divine – enough that Mina could almost imagine what gran-Tom meant when she said holy tea should be made out of roses. But Mina wasn’t going to pick any of them! They were going to stay down here in the salt-spray where nobody ever went and be a secret that just she knew about.
Of course, the Other One did have a way of finding things out, and did have a horrible, horrible sort of way of throwing a fit when it didn’t get what it wanted…. But Mina had been sent down here for oyster bells and that was all she was damn well going to bring back, the thick-smelling, sneezy lot of them.
Just then the kraken screamed its version of ‘boo’ again and whipped its tentacles out from where Mina had actually stepped this time, so that her feet flew up in the air and she came down hard and sharp on one shoulder, very nearly sending her basket of oyster bells tumbling straight into the foaming waves. As it was, she got a nasty gash across her hand as her thank you for holding on, even through the horrible steel-pig-hide gloves, and ended up bleeding enough to make half of that glove crusty and stiff with it by the time she eventually made it back up to the spire’s top. Because that was just how things were going today.
The roses glowed at her prettily as she got back to her shaky feet again, heart pounding in her ears.
And the kraken, as far as she could tell, was simply delighted.