RP:A Deep Conversation

Part of the No Seaborn Left Behind Arc

The Black Gulf

The ship glides out of the cove, leaving behind rugged cliffs, and the swell of open seas can be felt under one’s feet. A few hours out, waters that would sparkle blue-green in the sun abruptly darken as the vessel passes the edge of the continental shelf and enters waters of unimaginable depth; a great fissure that makes these the deepest waters in the world. Who knows what monstrous creatures lurk in the pressurized deeps below? One might be thankful that many horrors inhabiting this gulf have their ability to surface hindered, as they tend to explode in the lower pressures close to the surface. Still, there are those who can and do make the transition, as is evidenced by the occasional hump-back of a mighty whale or the flick of a sea-dragon’s tail—unfortunately and by far the lesser of the many perils lurking in these waters.

The Old One, perhaps for the first time this aeon, is really feeling his age. He rumbles softly, settling into a comfortable depression on the deep-sea floor hollowed out from rock and ancient corals by his own body as it gradually grew to its present leviathanic size. He inhales a great gulp of krill-bearing water, washed on gulf currents from the coastal seas and still vaguely warm despite the unplumbable depth that "Mac" calls home...when he isn't pretending to be human, that is. The thought of his brief sojourns on land, compressed into the clumsy. ambling shape of a land-walker, amuses him greatly. Rolling several tons of krill around in his gargantuan beaky mouth, just for enjoyment of the flavour, he finds himself missing even the bewildering dryness of the earthern-world and its tiny denizens, so richly intense and wild of thought and emotion. Like sun-drunk reef creatures or newborns of his own species that've eaten too much sweet plankton, he thinks, and chuckles at both.

Here, on the black sea floor, far from the garish, burning gaze of Arkhen's golden eye, most creatures who want light must make it for themselves. The Old One is no exception, his body's chemistry setting pale, scattered rings on his body ablaze with an alarming and intense blue glow as he senses the ripples of another mind far greater than his own. There's no other in existence who can overwhelm him like this, and the vast creatures upturns his many limbs in supplication, as millions of luminous jellyfish swarm his cosy nest, circling as one to produce a dizzying, bioluminescent swirl. From this blur of light pulses a voice that he never can be sure is made of actual sound though it vibrates his immense body like the largest whale shouting at the smallest of minnows.

"Cfwl'gthanghkhl'rhylthangaha'antw'issshagil" A wondrously soothing vocal symphony intones the kraken's true name, albeit the much shortened version favoured by Selene, beloved four-faced Mother of the Sea, who'd named him herself when he was merely small fry lost in a big ocean.

"Mother of us all," he replies, in tones so low and deep they shake the ocean floor around him, frightening away thousands of the more sensitive jellies . "How mayest I serve thee?"

"Faithful servant, Son of Our Dark Face and the Vasty Deep, it is Time once more that you must don Humanoid flesh and walk the Dry Lands, for a Lesser Evil has been born there, far below.... a fusion of Kraken and the vile, corrupted mind of ...." here, the Goddess -- more properly, a particularly holy avatar therefore-- speaks the words for 'monstrous vermin' in Kraken-tongue.

Shimmering, bubble-pocked images flash in the darkness: tentacled faces of creatures so deformed as to hurt the mind of even the Old One, committing such crimes against Nature that 'Mac"would willingly die if it would prevent even one more atrocity of that ilk.

"As thou command, Queen of Star and Sea." He says, and says no more for She is gone and he is left alone in the blackness, roiling with terrible knowledge. The incomparable agony of becoming a man-apparent named "Mac" once more is nothing, nothing at all, to him. Selene herself has given him purpose, it is his duty and privilege both to fulfill it.