Creatures Featured

Part One

The Kraken’s Story

The Kraken’s Story

The school of fish is close. I can feel them and taste them, and although I hunger, it is not time to feed. My mother is beside me, her mind closed to me as we wait. I hate waiting, but I am nearly a full cycle past my time as an egg, and I must learn to control my impulses.

We float, my mother and I, in deep waters, but near the boundary of the shallows. There are other beings near us—some common fish, some predators—but they all give us a wide berth. Even though I am not mature yet, I am larger than anything in the sea except for my own kind.

The dolphins visited recently, and since then my mother has been tense and quiet. She has not told me what tales they shared, but they could not have been good. I think it is why we are here.

Something is coming, I can hear it, but it is not a familiar sound. It is coming from the direction of the shallows, from the place where the rock rises out of the water. Mother tells me there are creatures there, strange creatures that live in the no-water and are somehow able to breathe.

Watch, daughter. Taste, feel. Tell me what you think it is, Mother says to me, her mind a comfort to mine.

I watch and I taste and both are foul. The thing slices though the surface of the water in a smooth, straight line. Its shape is long, narrow, and unnatural, and what I feel… I cannot describe it. There are beings on this thing in the no-water, and their minds are chaotic and troubled, worse than the surface of the sea when it is whipped up by the no-water when the lights stab down in bolts that shake.

And the thing is large, larger than some of my kind, larger than me. I feel something I have not felt since I became larger than the other predators. Fear.

I do not understand, I tell my mother.

They are enemy. You must destroy them. My mother is tense and worried.

How? It is large—larger than me, almost as large as you.

Follow, she tells me, diving down and swimming rapidly along the shelf of rock.

I follow, pushing water from my mantle and letting my tentacles relax and lengthen so that I move fast and catch up with Mother. We glide down into deeper, darker waters, passing several sharks and a school of large fish with yellow tails. It is still not time to feed, so I keep moving until we come to the floor of the ocean. There is something there I do not recognize. It is large, as large as my mother, covered with algae and sand. It is long, its shape unnatural, and has stiff, straight things, like tentacles that stick straight up. I can taste it; it is made of trees, which my mother has told me grow above in the no-water.

What is it? I ask.

Look at the bottom.

I swim down and look. It is shaped like the horrible thing that passed above us.

It is called ship, and this is what the Great Mother wants us to do with them. She wants us to bring them down. They are terrible; they destroy. You must learn to defeat them.

We live as masters of the sea, prey to none, but we are servants to the Great Mother. We do her bidding even if that means our bodies will be destroyed and our spirits released back to Her. Mother tells me that the ship and the beings on it prey on us. That they are wrong-spirited and kill more than they eat, that they always expand their territory even if there is room for all, that now that they are here, in our ocean, we must fight them back, not let their ships on the deep water.

She tells me stories that make me feel small and afraid, and then she has me attack the ship that lies on the bottom of the ocean. Biting at it with my beak, learning to hold it so my tentacles do not leave the water where they will be vulnerable.

I don’t like this at all, but I do as she instructs. I attack and attack, eat through the wood to make a hole, expand the hole with my tentacles. I do this until I am exhausted and hungry and what is left does not look like a ship, just a jumble of dead trees.

The creatures on the ships do not breathe water like right-spirited creatures. If we create holes in their ships, those ships will sink and the monsters will die.

Mother tells me tomorrow I will sink my first ship, but that now I can go feed and rest.

She swims away, but I stay looking at the pile of no-longer-ship and am afraid.

We watch, our eyes just above the water, as the ship skims past. It has great white membranes that catch the wind. Mother has taught me that word—wind—to describe the restless no-water. The wind in the white membranes push the ship along. We watch because Mother wants me to understand our enemy.

I do not like the wind. It makes my skin feel strange and my eyes hurt. I cannot breathe wind, nor can I swim through it. I can’t imagine what it must be like to live above the water in the wind. I do like birds, though. I should be watching the ship, but I am watching them instead. They swim in the wind much as we swim in the water. For a moment, I feel bad for the terrible creatures on the ship. They breathe the wind, but they cannot swim in it like the birds. They are stuck to the ship and cannot soar.

There is noise aboard the ship, strange sounds I don’t understand, and the ship turns, its white membranes snapping as the beings on it point their stiff arms at us.

They have seen us, Mother tells me. Her mantle enlarges as she pulls in water, getting ready to move. I feel such fear, I am unable to do anything. I stare at the ship, the thing made of dead trees, as it groans and slowly turns towards us. It is clumsy, but it is so big. I feel the minds aboard the ship; they are eager for their prey. We are their prey.

Dive, Mother tells me as she sinks below the surface, but I cannot move. I cannot think. We, the chosen of the Great Mother, are not prey. A school of sharks working in concert can challenge us, but they rarely do so. Sometimes an overambitious whale might attack, but despite their size, it’s not much of a problem. But these tiny creatures long for a fight; they long to kill us.

The ship grows closer, and I can see the beings more clearly. They have skin that ranges in color from pink to brown and strangely flexible and oddly colored shells. They have four stiff arms. They move around on the bottom two, and the top two have strange claws that end in stiff little tentacles that they use to manipulate things. They have no fins, no tail, no antennae, but some kind of fur grows on their heads and faces. Their shells are all different colors in white, brown, and blue. There are three of them at the front of the ship, their top arms busy with something I can’t fathom.

Dive, now! Mother tells me, her thoughts urgent. But still I stare.

There is a loud noise, and something flies from the ship towards me. It is long and narrow. My mother rises out of the ocean, the sharp thing piercing her mantle. From the ship, the creatures make rough, inelegant noises, and in their minds, I sense joy. This thing, this stinger they hurled, has pierced my mother. I feel her pain in my mind.

She releases her ink and sinks below the surface and tries to swim away, but the stinger is attached to the ship and it begins to pull her in, the stinger doing more damage to her. She is in horrible pain. I can feel it, and it makes me more afraid.

Do as I taught you, she tells me. Do the will of the Great Mother.

I am below the water, my tentacles entwined with hers. I taste her blood and feel her pain. These creatures are cruel. If they truly are our predators, they should afford us the dignity of a clean, quick death so we may return to the Great Mother in joy to serve again.

Mother has been pulled close to the ship and is being drawn up into the no-water, into the wind. As her mind fades, I feel the creatures’ minds become stronger, more joyful. I sense their hunger. They want to eat my mother. This, at least, is a right-spirited thing to do with your prey. But they are few, and the waste will be tremendous. It will not honor my mother.

I am below the water and, though I cannot see it, I feel my mother’s pain as they pierce her with more of their long, sharp stingers. The water fills with her blood, and her tentacles go limp.

To the Great Mother I go, she tells me, and then I can’t feel her mind anymore. I let go of her tentacles and sink into the deep, dark ocean.

The wind dwellers are enemy. I know this. I grieve for the loss of my mother, but I know that she was right-spirited, that the Great Mother will take her and use her again, finding her another noble vessel for her spirit.

But what of me?

My mind in chaos, a current pulls me out into deeper waters, and I slowly sink. My will is gone, my spirit is damaged by what I have seen. Mother wanted me to attack these ships, but how can I when they so easily defeated her? The ships are so large, the stingers so sharp. I am so afraid.

As I float, I am surrounded by a small school of sharks. They sense my grief and fear, and they keep close to me as I drift, as I sink, as my mind despairs.

Over time, more sharks join, and they swim all around me. I am trapped. There are enough of them to defeat me, enough of them to honor my death by eating my flesh. If they do, I will return to the Great Mother. Perhaps I will be reunited with my mother.

The sharks have grown excited, their minds focused on me. They are going to attack. It would not be a bad death, but so confused am I that my spirit is not right. My mother died defending her child and doing the Great Mother’s bidding. There is no more right-spirited way to die than that. But me, I will die from my grief. Will the Great Mother even welcome me then?

That stirs something in me, the will to survive. I slowly pull water into my mantle, not wanting the sharks to attack quite yet. I study them as they circle me. There are only a few below.

I listen carefully; I watch them closely. When they move in to attack, I swim straight down, brushing past several sharks. The water expelled from my mantle is my main source of propulsion, but I also use my tentacles, holding them together as one and moving them as if they were a long tail. I guide my path with the fin on my mantle.

The burst of speed catches the sharks by surprise, and I put a little distance between us, but sharks can swim faster than I can over the long run. That is why I head down, straight down.

I had drifted quite deep in my lethargy, down to where the light is dim, but now I swim as fast as I can, deeper and deeper. Relying on my tentacles to keep me moving, I draw water into my mantle, feeling the sharks grow close, and then I expel the water and gain more distance.

This goes on, for how long I could not say. The sharks snapping at my tentacles, but their numbers thinning out. Some because they thought I could be taken without a fight, more because they were not fast enough, and yet more because of the depth.

I swim until I am exhausted, until there is no light, until I can feel the great ocean pressing on me from all sides, until I am alone.

There are strange things down here. Fish that glow with their own light, fish with giant eyes, strangely shaped fish that look like rocks, and, distant cousins of mine, small, pale squid. The water presses hard against me, along with my exhaustion and grief. I continue to sink. Down into the depths of the great ocean, deeper than I have ever been, deeper than the stories my kind tell.

The world was once just water without fish or shark or crab. The only being in its vastness was the Great Mother, and she was lonely. She created ocean dwellers one by one to keep her from being so lonely, to fill the ocean with life and spirit. And it was good, but not quite complete. In the end, she created one final species to watch over the ocean when she was away creating more oceans and more right-spirited creatures. She created my species, the Kraken. We were not created in her image, for the Great Mother’s majesty cannot be captured in mere flesh, but we were created so that all others swimming in the ocean would recognize us as her emissary.

As I drift deeper and the swimmers become less frequent and the ocean presses harder, I can’t help but think of the Great Mother. Was this dark, cold, lonely place what it was like before she created all of us? Before she imagined the ocean as a world full of life and not just darkness?

And then I can see her. She is a light in the darkness, so bright, so brilliant. And she is nothing more than light, my eyes hurting at her brilliance.

Do not give up, my child, she tells me, and the sound of her is joy in my mind. Do as your mother bade you. Know your enemy. Let them have the land, but keep them out of my ocean.

My mother, I begin, trying to tell her of my great shame and sorrow.

She is with me, my child. All is well. Now go. And she shows me things, but not in words. Things that I don’t fully understand. I see the world as a drop of water, perfectly round, surrounded by darkness that is only broken by tiny bits of light. She shows me there are many of these in the darkness and that this world is not the only world. That the Great Mother has seeded oceans on many worlds and has lost them to the strange wind-breathing creatures. That this world is young and there is still a chance that the oceans can remain pure and right-spirited.

The water is so heavy on me that I can barely move. I draw a small amount of water into my mantle and swim up. The light of the Great Mother is gone, but my spirit is right now. I must do her bidding. I must guard the oceans against the wrong-spirited. I must find a mate and have children to carry on the work. I must honor my mother and her great sacrifice.

The sun and the wind burn my eyes as I watch them. There are two of them in a very small ship made of dead trees. One is the size of the other wind-breathing creatures I have seen with bits of fur on his head and face. The other one is much smaller with long fur on her head; she stares at me.

I have entered the shallow waters as far as is safe for me to come. I have looked on the land and the strange, upright creatures crawling on it, using their odd claws to build things. I do not understand them or what they are doing, but I do see that they are changing the land, dramatically. Many trees are gone, there are brown gashes on the land, and they build strange things out of dead trees that are shaped unnaturally and have a purpose beyond me.

In the very small ship, the larger creature has a stick in his claws and is dangling it over the water with a thread that is tipped with a tiny hook. I watched from below for quite some time. They have used this stick and thread and hook to catch some fish, but in a right-spirited way. Just enough so they can live.

The small creature must be new from the egg, not yet mature. That one has seen me and her eyes look into mine and I see that there is spirit there. Did the Great Mother create them, too? If so, why have they destroyed other oceans? It would be so easy to lash out with one of my longer tentacles, wrap it around the very small ship and crush it, pulling them under, feeding on their flesh to honor their spirits.

But I don’t.

I sink below the surface and swim out to deeper seas.

This ship is large, larger than the one that killed my mother. I am far below it, watching its strange form slice through the surface of the water, driven by the wind. I feel for their minds, and there are many and their disorderly thoughts hurt me. They are hunters. They are not right-spirited.

I have a duty to the Great Mother, to my mother, to my fellow creatures of the ocean. There are not many of my kind, each female having her own territory. The males die after mating so it is we who must guard and protect.

But I fear the stingers of the ship, so sharp, so strong. I watch, but still cannot act, visions of my mother’s death plaguing me.

The two wind-breathing creatures are in their very small ship again as they use their stick and thread and hook to capture fish. It is the same two, the normal-sized creature with fur on its face and the small, new-from-the-egg creature with eyes that show spirit.

If the Great Mother did not create them, who did? They cannot see me, and I can feel their minds. They are calm minds, simple minds. They fish to live. They feel love towards one another. There is another creature on the shore in one of the things they built that they love too. A family, like me and my mother once were.

I rise up slowly, at a distance, and the little one sees me right away. Her mouth opens and sounds come out, her claw pointing at me. The bigger one is afraid; the smaller one is delighted.

I move slowly towards them, and the big one is now paralyzed in fear while the small one makes more sounds with her mouth. They fish for their family in a right-spirited way. With one of my longer, hooked tentacles, I snag a fish—small for me, but large for them—and drop it into their very small ship. The larger creature is even more afraid, but the small one is very, very happy. I watch as the large creature uses his claws and some sticks to clumsily move the very small ship towards the shore.

Not all wind-breathing creatures are wrong-spirited.

This confuses me. I wish my mother was here. She could help me. I think of going back into the depths and seeing if the Great Mother would appear again, but I doubt it. She was clear, she wants me to stop the great ships, keep the wind-breathing creatures to the land.

Above me, another ship slices through the ocean, driven by its great white membranes that catch the wind. I am still afraid of it and its great stingers, but I decide to try something. After it has passed, I rise to the surface and watch it, the wind hurting my eyes, the sun so very bright above.

I feel their many minds, but more carefully now, trying to visit one at a time. Some are proud, some are scared, some are lustful, some calm. They are not as one as a pod of dolphins would be. Their minds are scattered, lacking unity. They are well past me when I hear the noises they make from their mouths. The ship slowly turns and their minds change. Fear, anticipation, hunger. They are predators. They mean to kill me.

I freeze again, just like with my mother. Their stinger will spear me, and I will feel pain like my mother did. They will put all their stingers in me and pull me up into the wind. They will honor my flesh by eating it, but surely, they are too few to truly honor it.

And what do they gain? The shallows are full of fish, enough fish to feed all of them, so why do they hunt a creature such as I?

The ship grows closer, moving from side to side, the wind not blowing in my direction, forcing the ship to move in a most awkward way.

I feel their minds again, and they all feel fear, some of them pure fear, some mixed with lust, a few with anger. I can see their stinger as a group of the wind-breathing creatures attend to the thing that hurls it forth. I no longer believe they have shells, but rather cover their soft bodies with colorful membranes, the same kind that they use to catch the wind. How can such a delicate creature be so bold?

The oceans are mine; the Great Mother has said so. The ship grows closer, their minds grow tense, they are about to release their stinger.

Visions of my mother’s death, memories of her pain in my mind, assault me. I will not fall to them.

I sink below the surface just as they release their stinger. I feel it pierce the water above me. I dive down and watch as the ship passes over where I was and turns around. They are seeking me, but they are trapped in the wind, and I am in the water, the bottom of their dead-tree ship exposed to me.

I rise up out of the water again, behind them. I must know my enemy. They turn their ship, this time with the wind blowing in my direction, and they move towards me, fast. Again, I dive right before they release their stinger.

Hunters they may be, but they are ill equipped to hunt my kind. My mother fell prey to them only because she was protecting me.

That thought is like a rock in my beak, hard and painful. She is gone because of me. These wind-breathing creatures are monsters, hunting what they don’t need, lusting after the kill.

Above, they are still seeking me, their desire still there but also their fear. They fear me just as I fear them.

This thought brings me to motion as I do as my mother wanted me to do, as the Great Mother wants me to do. I come up underneath the ship and touch my tentacles to it, the suckers latching on. I am careful to keep completely under the water. I pull my beak close, and just as I did with the ship at the bottom of the ocean, I bite it. I let my anger at these wrong-spirited creatures out as I rapidly chew.

I can feel the vibration of my chewing through the dead wood, and so can the creatures, their minds moving from fear to terror. For this, I am grateful. After I chew through, wind escapes from the ship in great bubbles. This surprises me, and I let go of my grip, and the ship slides past as a great stream of wind bubbles up through the water.

I swim down far below the ship and feel the panic in the creatures’ minds. I watch the ship slowly sink, see the wind-breathing creatures put small ships into the water and get into them.

The small ships remind me of the right-spirited creatures I met in the shallows. I swim below the small ships as the big ship falls onto its side and begins to sink rapidly. I could easily lash out with a tentacle and break these small ships, but I think