SSCS 02: Installment 8 of 32
How to Catch Flying Pigs, and Sea Monsters
This is Installment 8 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…
“Now that –” he started, the tiny scales around his eyes flashing a brief gold. But before he could say anything else, the kraken gave another of its bone-grindingly loud and terrifying screams, and a black shadow ran swiftly over them. When the great sea creature heaved itself into view once again it was with something large and messily bloody clutched in its tentacles, and while Mina’s hind-brain held her very, very still and dripped a line of pure, cold fear down her spine, her fore-brain noted with great annoyance that stupid Primsickle’s death meant the demon kraken was going to be airborne even longer.
…How to Catch Flying Pigs, and Sea Monsters
Installment 8: 19.0503
She didn’t have a chance to follow that line of thought, however, because just in that moment, the breeze shifted, and the over-powering scent of roses washed over them.
It was a perfect, soft sweetness, in perfect counterpoint to the morning sunlight and the salty sea air. Even the writhing and ripping of the kraken grew momentarily less agitated, and Mina felt her body sag, as though the relief the scent seemed to offer was truly tangible, something real and warm and sunny and touched with morning dew.
But Mina knew what came next, and so even though her knees bent and her shoulders rounded, the ice-spear of fear down her spine stayed, and was joined by a heavy ball of cold, hard dread in her stomach.
“Gran-Tom, is that you?” she called, her voice, too, high and sweet in a way it never would be on its own. And it was just as false, too, because the thing she was calling to wasn’t gran-Tom at all, but a something that squatted sometimes in gran-Tom’s body, through no means Mina had ever dared to understand. The kraken’s eye-stalks turned toward Mina at the sound of her voice, but she didn’t have a choice – the Other One had woken up, and whatever it was, its compulsion was ever so much stronger than the heart-call gran-Tom would normally use, even on her crabbiest days. The Other One expected things to be a certain way. And so they were.
“Gran-Tom? I ask your humblest apologies.” The words spilled themselves out, like the ritual they shouldn’t be but were, and Mina’s knees bent the rest of the way, down to the rough, stone ground, and her head tipped back and to the side, exposing the length of her throat. She was allowed to keep her eyes open and stare to the horizon, but not to turn her head to look anywhere specific. She couldn’t check to see what the flying kraken thought of all this, or even Hedwin. She couldn’t move, except for the shudder that passed over the whole of her skin when she remembered just how quickly said kraken had sighted its last meal and snatched it up.