SSCS 02: Installment 26 of 32
How to Catch Flying Pigs, and Sea Monsters
This is Installment 26 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…
Mina shuddered, almost choking on her fish and earning an alarmed look from Hedwin as a thought came to her: What if the humming was all acolytes were allowed to start with? What if she was going to be buzzing all night? If so, that’d be just great; she’d be practically begging for the drudgery of tea and cooking and the Other One’s tyranny – even dodging demon kraken – before the night was done.
…How to Catch Flying Pigs, and Sea Monsters
Installment 26: 21.0408
***
As it turned out, Mina didn’t remember a thing about that night except, of course, for the kraken.
She could see it better this time. Well, better than she’d been able to see it before. That day, she’d seen it far too well, far too close up, and in far too many poses – but none of them in the water where a kraken was supposed to be. But that night…
There was a sound, and when the sound was right it was as though the distance across the waves vanished, as though the shadows of the waves were lifted, and she could see the kraken, flying through them. Not like the ridiculous flying it had done earlier – though the deadliness was the same – this was the sort of flying a kraken was made for. Not like it moved through the waves, but like it was the ocean. No wonder the kraken was part and parcel when gran-Tom sang the tides.
And there was violence in it too. In the night, in the moonlight, the world was all shades of black-and-grey, and so too were the kraken’s rainbow hues extinguished. Instead there was only the vast reach of its tentacles and claws, scything through the grey water, the burning gleam in an eye when it turned one of them back to face them, its jailors, and the hard, black heart of its beak. That was an inky lodestone that Mina could see all-too-clearly now – when the sound turned itself just right.
Perhaps there was a rising and a falling also. Perhaps there was a vast blackness beneath them, and a vast blackness overhead, more than overhead, beyond the sky even. There may have been a song out there, far, far beyond, but Mina couldn’t catch it. Any time she almost did, there was a fuzzing and the sense of song was gone, and the kraken’s eyes were gleaming back at her, glaring in the far distance across the waves. She wanted to reach out to it, curl her tentacles around it, and slide into the water – and she couldn’t remember why she didn’t, what was stopping her.
The moon was high and perfect, though, round as a kraken’s eyes. And she could taste the kraken’s scent on the salty night air, cutting the distance between them –
***
Mina jerked awake to a jab of sunlight, a feeling like an anvil sitting on her head, and a throat that both felt and tasted like an encampment of spiny urchins had taken up residence therein.
Despite the pain, she had her feet under her and her hand groping for her steel-pig-hide gloves before the memory that there weren’t any roses to pick today filtered back into her thoughts. Then she remembered the oyster bells, and the kraken playing peek-a-boo, and…other memories of the kraken.
Gran-Tom had said she’d start teaching her to sing last night, and she probably had (based on the feeling when Mina tried to swallow), but Mina couldn’t remember any of it, not one note.
At that moment, a shadow loomed in the archway of Mina’s nook, resolving after a moment into gran-Tom. The priestess’ voice was raspy and old as she growled out, “That was not supposed to happen.”