SSCS 02: Installment 6 of 32
How to Catch Flying Pigs, and Sea Monsters
This is Installment 6 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…
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.
…How to Catch Flying Pigs, and Sea Monsters
Installment 6: 19.0320, 22.0412
From the smell – even the distant smell – Mina had always imagined the kraken would look rather like a big lump of seaweed, or else maybe something black all over with sharp edges. But as rotten as the kraken smelled, it looked beautiful.
It looked like the sea with the dawn light glinting off it, or shining through the crest of a wave. Turquoise and indigo and rose pink and golden. Its body was many limbed, but tentacles didn’t quite describe it. They were more soft-edged and fluttery, or at least Mina imagined that they would be in the water. Dangling in the air hovering over their heads they were rather limp and floppy, like a wad of laundry just slung over the line rather than hung up proper. But still, somehow, translucently beautiful, even while Mina quietly sucked air through her teeth and struggled to breathe past the stench.
Also (and this was part of why Mina was right now holding as still as she was, and why the little hairs all over her body were standing straight up on end) the kraken very much didn’t move like limp laundry. When it moved, like now, drifting closer and closer, it looked like it must really look in the water, swimming powerfully and purposefully through the air, deadly-looking, like the air was the water and it really was in its natural element. Either this kraken had had flying fruit before, or it was preternaturally much, much quicker to adapt itself to this half mind-powered locomotion than Hedwin ever had been – and that by itself was terrifying.
“Is it angry?” Hedwin squeaked. From the direction of his voice, just behind Mina, he kind of sounded like he was crouching down to make himself smaller than she was and use her as a shield.
Mina cocked her head at the question – just the barest fraction, since she still was trying not to move. A kraken didn’t need to be angry to be terrifying. But maybe Hedwin was picking up on those gold tints flashing along the edges of its tentacles. As a creature half from the sea himself, those subtle nuances of color probably stood out to him much stronger. “I don’t know,” Mina whispered back. “Is it worse if it turns out it’s angry, or just hungry?”
Just then, though, they became aware of a low, sweet-edged humming throbbing through the air, slowly building in volume, as some sort of mist (or bits of dust?) spattered down around them. Then they both jumped as the kraken, now directly above them, let out not a shriek, but a chirp. And it kept chirping. And now Mina was quite sure that wasn’t some mist falling around them; the bits were getting noticeably bigger.
“Oh, sh–”