SSCS 02: Installment 5 of 32
How to Catch Flying Pigs, and Sea Monsters
This is Installment 5 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…
Because of course, just because a pig could fly, didn’t mean it would fly, …or keep doing so. And what happens when a greedy pig that’s eaten flying fruit flies up over the spire well, stops flying (for no logical reason what-so-ever – pigs are stupid!), and falls down to be eaten by the kraken? Well now it seems the kraken’s eaten some flying fruit, too.
…How to Catch Flying Pigs, and Sea Monsters
Installment 5: 19.0311
“Please tell me I’m still in a drunken stupor and this is all a bad dream.” Hedwin’s voice from just behind Mina’s shoulder came out high-pitched and squeaky in a way Mina hadn’t heard in almost two years. Rather than answer, she held up a hand to shush him and started to slink her head lower, sidling backwards down the stair. It definitely could see her, but maybe…
Another shriek, and now there were three eyeballs peeking at them up over the lip of the stair, as the rest of the kraken’s body rose ominously upward into view.
It was…ugh! It was smellier than Mina had thought before. Gran-Tom liked to sing to it sometimes, sitting with her feet and tentacles dangling over the lip of the well, and so Mina – bringing cup after cup of damned holy tea – had had many a chance to look down into that well while the wind gusted up out of it carrying the smell of salty sea and iron bars and always an extra curl of something sharp and sour and burning. The well was deep and the smell was the only way she’d really known it was even in there. Up close – really only a flight of stone stairs away – the smell was so strong Mina wasn’t sure she could breathe through it. It burned her nose and the back of her throat, and the sour slid all the way down and into her stomach, turning it into a hard, tight knot.
She’d only ever seen the kraken on the holy days of the full moon, when gran-Tom sang the songs that were more, the Moon songs, and the kraken was let out into the wide wash of the sea to help call the tides. But that was only seeing it from a far distance, standing at the top of the spire and looking down into the ocean, seeing only the shadow of its bulk against the water, maybe an extra curling of wave riding the lines of it, or a brief, round eye turning and staring back at her and then gone. This was the first time Mina’d ever seen it up close.
She hadn’t even imagined it might be so many colors.