out in the deep, I've seen something real
the mouth of the void that the waves conceal
Ischia is a strange place, a bizarre land where scattered islands and shallows provided warmth and food… gave unto life the pleasures of paradise and never allowed them the unkindness of the very hells lingering at the edge of their primitive and miniscule world. Still, they had needed only travel beyond the shallows to see the beginnings of it… to see the dark water and sand that sloped into perilous black. The lightless reaches were shadowed by shark and beasts unknown, by whales and leviathans beyond comprehension: grasping tentacles and beaks that preyed upon all manner of life. Otherworldly geometry built the corals and caves, and volcanic waters rippled near the vents… boiled even.
This is where the sound first came, where the call of voices bled into the sea and carried out into the aphotic depths and beyond. And this? This was the problem, for sound carries further and faster beneath the waves and it rings louder than it existed on land, and within the graveyard of bones… a kraken had begun to stir.
A singular barbell shaped iris flattened into a line as her eyes opened, and shortly thereafter the legs rose and tentacle slithered out as the pressurized depths bore upon her with little issue or hinderance. Yidhra, ancient and callous, moved through the vast emptiness of the depths: walked between whalebones and shark’s teeth, slithered across carcasses of rotting fish and porpoise. Corals and worms all shriveled as she moved through them and with a torrent of air jettisoned through her chitinous beak she laughed and chittered the razorsharp parts.
From the blackest portion of the ocean she moved, graceful and bizarre, and her lungs heaved with water as she broke the surface and found herself dragged upon the shore. Black in color with patterns of white and gray varnished upon her… the porous and hairless skin glistened and dripped with water. A mass of writhing, countless tentacles lingered along her neck and another pair stretched from her shoulders… barbs and suckers visible beneath them. It was no surprise her tail was such as well, a mass of writhing and grasping appendages; but more worrying for some was that while portions looked akin to a horse…
Yidhra was most certainly not.
The Kraken’s face ended in tentacles as well, a mass which waves and bent and exposed the massive, sharp black beak that snapped and chattered as she drifted across the sands and through the land: as she peered with barbell irises at the gathered forms of others and languished in the chaos of the scene ahead.
She had not heard the speeches prior, not recognized any faces more than two, but when she carries herself upward there is a sudden pulse in the air that carries with it a bizarre sound: laughter or something akin to clicking.
“Pretty faces all gathered and in-place.” she cooed, purred even, and her voice echoed in an impossible way as the accent that colored her words was well ancient and old. “Such a thing to disturb an old slumbering beast.”
She made no attempts to obfuscate the muscles that rippled beneath the skin, nor the rounded belly she carried with her: playful eyes made at Ivar when she passed but no more else. She lingered though, watching and listening- curious.
