I’m the Mountain That Moves

I’m the Pale Death axin yon tentacled ones

Topside.

The ocean and her beclouded beau splash rivulets down my flanks. A salt-flecked jet of ocean air floods my lungs, fit for five hundred heartbeats. A full dive-breath down, that future shrouded scrimmage calls to me. Headnoise screams. Downward, darkward.

I’m the Mountain That Moves. I’m the Pale Death axin yon tentacled ones. My other brothers and sisters, piles of murd’rous flesh all, hardly call it slaughter lest I join the rumbling, crushing abyss. May my scrimshaw roughshod ‘cross ‘em, and bloodlust fill my brain and that godforsaken ceph meat in my belly. Only monsters fill us.

Yet again I say a silent prayer ouf roiling air. My fluke flies high.

I dive, first among my slathering brood.

Invader am I. I’m a bludgeon, a wide wedge that stricks the water cleaven, and deeper I push. Primordial hands morphed me, my shape, my might, like a cruel weapon—ugly, fierce, incorrigible. Let those squids hap to hide; they always fail, always find their death by us, and this time na differ.

Plunge. The cold is a harken marker that I’m home. Open, open, my head-noise sings and blooms.

I press hard enough the water thickens and flees vonst pressure. Ever downward, the minutes pulse as each booming pump inside me. I hear tuna part away in terror, sardines spill away in millions. Finally those sharks with broad heads and alien-split eyes pause marauding and back away to cheat my hungry wake; even those predators size to dumb shrimp ‘gainst my girth. Dark eats the familiar and bright to them but I’m the monster of the deep.

The living river next. Countless bodies rising and falling with the sun, and I plow through ‘em. Glowing creatures, and those with maws like weapons, and those who float without minds, all the tapestry I tear. Like rain upon the surface skin, my head-noise clatters against a billion bodies clat-clat-clatclatclatclatclat.

My stomach twists: these would be hardly scraps when I crave the feast, the great squid beast. Each heavy fin paddle throws me down darkward my length again and again.

The salt grows heavy. It’s my comfort.

Right there, at the edge where the glint fails and only my head-echos remain, those floating stones, whirring, vibrating, flashing. My kin na recognize them. They catch the shock chasing my passage. Human things. I’d crush them but hunger beckons harder.

Deeper.

Scant crushing tons can’t make me paler—no failure of my bracing blubber ‘gainst the force. I laugh at the dying light—those fragile beams fail in mere water even when they dodge the puny denizens above. Only our prey may fell us, though.

One-two-three clickcall ahead.

Thwup.

Thwup.

Thwup.

That sound-shape that makes my two-ton heart sing: a food whose existence I must ruin to process it.

Glowing jaws in acid-green swing through the dark—the ceph lifewater stains my teeth and tongue. My passage shines as I rouse plankton into action like they log my legend for my future brood.

I know a disgusting round eye, bloated, dwarfing my own, swivels ouf my sight.

My skullfat trembles as I grow close. Click click click and each one crashes through the water, the loudest roars in the sea before the metal ones came. Headnoise screams.

Tighter, hardening: click click click click clickclickclick cliiiiiiiiii

A solid beam like a spear of iceberg stabs on.

I strike; I ravage; I wound.

The beaked beast flails—thuthwipthwupthwup—and I close in. Ceaseless clicks pry his shape I hear, his tentacles arching and pointing.

Closer, closer. There’s not a living force of this sea or earth fit to stop me.

Closer, closer! I’ve many-a-scar but always denied a ceph a death-blow ‘pon me.

WHOOM

Collision.

Two giants roil in the non-light, a thrashing knot of viscera and hunger. Shockwaves burst away with each shake and jerk.

The beast’s sucker tongues lash ‘cross my seams and stitches vonst old wounds. Now it knows fear. Go on, mindless meat, despair, where hundreds of your ilk likewise died. You’re next. You’re mine.

Its beak skrees against my jawbone. My head jerks, and I try to position it for the death-bite. Mantle’s in my mouth, parts like whale milk between my scrim. No—a miss. A non-lethal blow.

But then—a new sound. Too late.

Pain ‘pon my back. Another.

Another ceph.

I rage against two. Headnoise screams. Thwup thwup thwup thwupthwup.

I lash hard enough to crack my spine to shake off the second scatlinger. It loses no purchase ‘cross me, sinks in deeper, beak bleeding me.

A different battle booms. Now a true threat tests me. We’ve tales of these times. I still hold my breath, my heart works slowly, and the heavy water still squeezes my ribs like I remember, but now I’m between two.

I’m never between two. Now I focus, now I fear.

Upside-down? Don’t know.

The first ceph, flesh-wounded, escapes another bite, and my face stings vonst desperate clutching. The beak behind me drills into my back but not enough to slow me down.

I taste my bloodcloud.

Headnoise screams again. What’s around me? Where are my kin? I remember the story my broodma clicked to me, her own broodpa found dead at depth.

I’ve godsblood; I can still drown.

My lungs are great and heavy but don’t dare infinity.

Do they know? In their damned language of smells or tentacled squails, are they joined in plan?

I must choose, fight and rise, or rise and fight. The battles can’t last this long.

Choose: Pale Death, Mountain That Moves, though you don’t kill now, and they don’t fear a leaking mountain.

VOOOOMMWHRRRRR VOOOOOOMWHRRRRR

Louder than a thousand whalefolk, I hear it. Louder than when magma cracks the earth, even the cephs hear it.

We are near the seafloor. I hardly plunge this far about the snowing detritus and igneous ridges.

We all fall away, so strange is the upheaval. The very earth is gnashing—my stomach heaves. It’s more powerful than any click, perfectly rhythmic atop a crunching, screaming, dying rock.

Like the tide, we are drawn in. Time hides. My lungs still hold. Never in my life or the countless stories of our broods has a whalefolk witnessed this.

Closer, closer, with the cephs by my side to steal a sight of this crime against our world; I can’t stop.

A second sun alights over the next stone spine. Countless lights even blinding my eyes in this place where the sun has never touched. And the noise—

Greater, maximal, shattering the ocean across our bodies. My scrim chatter. The force batters us, and I know what it strikes through brains too.

Rage. Hate. Power.

I thought I hated ceph—I burn them inside me for my strength, to go on growing to kill ever more—but that wasn’t hate I know now. It was destiny, pred and prey. Here was something ghastly, beyond our grisly bond born in the world.

Not this.

Unclean. Foreign. Earth-sick.

My heart drums faster than a whale’s heart may do. It burns my air, but I can stay, I know I can; I know I can accomplish one last killing but it won’t be the mantle or the arms of these squids aside me but whatever living, roaring nightmare is before us. My fluke flashes, and to my surprise, the ceph are at my side, propelling themselves in a blinder rage than mine, ready to destroy. Humans, we all know—humans.

I feel something foreign touch my mind. It can’t stop me either.

Glowing jaws flanked by spreading arms with suckers cruel descend on this pod of shining stone and screaming bone. Damn the fools; now we axin to strike yon.

— — —

As soon as Pelagimancer Cyrus walked into the chorus of suffering in the Brave Dive’s medical wing, the doctor rushed over, looking everywhere else but into his eyes. The Pelagimancer’s jaw was sharp as trench-wall.

“Mancer, thank God you’re here. Right, right, you’re here for—yes, come this way. Be careful stepping over the bodies, some of them are still alive.”

As they tiptoed through the minefield of triaging, frantic nurses hopped around them like flying fish over a craft. A thumb’s-width of water rolled across the floor between the slickening footsteps.

“A decade casting at the local whalefolk, and Mancer Bolyn couldn’t stop this,” Pelagimancer Cyrus murmured, letting the wounded moans drown the words.

“Sorry, I…” The doctor’s access token trembled in the air against the slate-green square next to the door.

Cyrus said nothing, only placed his hand on the other man’s, and the shivering stilled. They stepped beyond the whirring door into a room more machine than airspace, and more mechanical than alive.

A spasming dark man with silvercoin eyes lay supine in one of the only open spaces, the white bed, with equally white foam crawling down his jaw. He stared at the ceiling, and each attempted blink was a failure as if angels bade them open.

Cyrus straightened. “Status of Pelagimancer Bolyn?”

“A-as I mentioned in the report. Half—” He could barely get the breath out.

“—way. He’s halfway.” The Pelagimancer winced, brows hunkering low: “You left it on him?”

“I was afraid it would, I don’t know, aggravate h-h-his—”

“He’s fucked.” Cyrus slipped off the headpiece, like a silver wire tongue of two gods. Pelagimancer Bolyn didn’t change. His successor eyed the vast web communicator.

“Lord, no, don’t put it on. The power of that thing,” his eyes shot to the wall, to those things beyond, “I—we’d never s-seen something with this level of interiority, like a—”

Pelagimancer Cyrus raised it up a laurel, imagining the psyche of the ocean scouring his skull clean. Another tremor rocked the mining base, likely damage from the whale.

What could it have been thinking…

A groan swept up through the floor into their legs. Cyrus could hear the doctor breathing harder against the thickening CO2.

He lowered the laurel onto his own temple, leaving a streak of blood in his silver hair.

The doctor wailed.

A heavy, heavy voice thundered into Cyrus’s ears. It was too late to take off the headpiece; waves under a poisoned sky crashed in front of him.

Topside.

The ocean and her beclouded beau splash rivulets down my flanks. A salt-flecked jet of ocean air floods my lungs, fit for five hundred heartbeats. A full dive-breath down, that future shrouded scrimmage calls to me. Headnoise screams. Downward, darkward.

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Six Stars - Guide & Table of Contents

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