And the Darkling Reefs Abide

Chapter 1

At the eleventh eclipse, on last day of eternal summer, I decided I would kill the high priestess of Avelt.

For this act, there were reasons and justifications — of that I was assured. But, I was told, I stood not to the task of understanding. Nothing unusual for me — it was to be expected, if anything.

A sharp, final sound cut through my thoughts, flinching me, and what followed were fading noises which could, blasphemously, be called scurrying. The communion was over, that was what it meant. The god of death had departed.

On an inflating stalk, I rose. Cartilage popped back into place, happy that my polyp​-​like kneeling was over. My feeler tentacles brushed the cave dirt from my bell and I absorbed a breath. I was averting the eyes circling my bell and when the wiggly rhopalia were free, I saw once more.

…Should have seen, rather. In the engulfing darkness of the cave – broken only by a single shaft of sun from its mouth — all visuality was reduced to mere suggestions. Macrohydra floated idly about and darting wasps made feast. Barnacles spread fervently around and wild coral claimed the linings of walls. Everywhere, worms crawled.

All this I knew, or guessed — little of it was seen. What I knew of the cave and what was unknown, both were equally reduced to mere silhouette and impression.

Long ago, I had strobilated in a dark warm cave — not this one, but the qualia was the same. And, as if in remembrance, the stalk holding me up slacked. I can rest here; that was the feeling in words.

With all the reluctance of one interrupting a dream, I focused sharply on the impressions which didn’t neatly fit into that comfortable image: I heard grunking and rattling; I felt a constant thrum of magic; I smelt corpses in every single stage of decay. Focusing on those, I was jarred from my reverie.

I straightened my stalk, killed the slack, and stood upright. I had decided I would kill the high priestess of Avelt, and I would.

A grasper tentacle groped out for my sunshield and another had found my travel bag and slung it around my bell and having everything, I fell onto my graspers.

It took three of your four grasper tentacles to walk — two if you had practice, if you absolutely couldn’t spare more. I was a master of both. It wasn’t a point of pride. With weight on my tentacles, my stalk curled inward, inverting into my bell. Like that I crawled away, crawled toward that shaft of light.

And then, I felt it as a tug, but only in my mind — inward, opposite the mouth, it was an urge to look, to glimpse.

There exist flowers, whose death​-​petals are visibly lined with swift spikes, and whose nectar is sweet and fain to attract little hydras to their end — a temptation which even their weak will can oft withstand.

If that which tugged my gaze were such a flower, then I am less than even the hydras. But the greatest wills do still falter, and I dare those who in my position would resist, I dare them be the first and only to criticize my action.

I unveiled my eyes, and looked.

It was a throne or shrine or portal, a sacred thing, and it rose up high and darkly exalted and crowned with wet spikes and it was the center and heart of the cave. It had earlier known the presence of the god of death — of that I was assured.

Brazenly, I leaned closer, breath tight in my bell.

Those easily impressed would note first of all the corpse impaled on the spikes, its mesoglea spilling out in rivulets, its gray membrane turning to leather, its long slender tresses ripped delicately out and all their cnidocytes dotting the ground, hollowed of their magical spark.

But what else would one expect in the demesne of death? Hardly a surprise, that.

No, peering closer at the crowned thing, I saw perhaps shed quills or feathers. Perhaps the diggings of claws. Perhaps a shadow, cast by a thing of such power that it lingered even after its caster had gone.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have looked. Mortal eyes weren’t to seek the form of gods. It was proscribed. It would be — it was — the highest disrespect. It would be maddening. Of that we were assured.

I drew my gaze away, and prayed a moment to that kind, general god of everyone, the god of knowing and certainty; I asked forgiveness for this trespass.

Was it a little thing, what I did? Perhaps. But for one such as myself, even little trespasses ought to be measured and corrected.

I’d fallen short in every area (of that, I was assured). Piety I could cling to. Piety I could control.

I absorbed a vast breath.

But I was a damned medusa already.

Of that, I assured myself.

The red sun aimed and struck true with such judgmental rays. I saw a dumb macrohydra like a tiny jellyfish floating blindly out of the cave, protectionless, and watched it start to dry and slightly wither not a cilia’s width outside the embrace of shadows.

Minutes later it was dead, and drifting to the ground, and still drying. It had been half my size, at least. I might last a few moments more. Cnidarians had it hardest in the eternal summer.

I looked. Farther outside the mouth of the cave, on the ledge which southwardly wound into the distance and northwardly curved out of view, there was a shelled star crawling along its way. On the aboral top, multicolored ossicles like scales caught and parried blinding rays of sun. Where its shell wasn’t rendered unintelligibly bright, you saw the design of the ossicles made a big plus sign shaped like a target.

An eager croak came north from around the curve and a frog with fangs was bounding over here. But its prey, the star, was swiftly snapping its rays snug into its shell. The bright​-​skinned frog slapped down right beside it, and was disappointed.

Before the thing left, though, its departing jump flipped over the star in its shell, like a petty little revenge.

With the frog gone, rays popped back out and waved and struggled, but writhe as they might, they couldn’t flip right the shelled star.

A grasper tentacle — my grasper tentacle — was reaching out and gingerly lifting and flipping the shelled star right side up. It went all still and timid then, but moments later, with my tentacle drawing back, the star was falling bottom first and flexing below it many tube​-​like podia like row upon wiggling row of walking grass.

Another tentacle was reaching for some tool in my bag and another still was taking that tool by the handle and then throwing it.

In the middle of the star now, just aside one arm of the big plus sign, there was lodged the blade of a knife.

…I had missed the target, that little plus sign shell marking, and I cringed. My aim needed more practice. Always needed more practice.

The star was screaming now, and my fourth and final tentacle now snatched the knife and stabbed again and quieted the screams, putting out the misery.

The sun crept further across the blue sky, shaving slivers off the shadows.

I fell back on my stalk, and tilted my bell and with three eyes stared up. Opposite the cave mouth was the other canyon wall, the top only just visible from this angle.

And beyond that was Avelt, and the sunspire, and at its top, the high priestess whom I would kill.

But for now, this canyon wall stood as my obstacle.

I stowed the knife away.

Moments later I realized I was resting on my stalk again, immersed in my thoughts again. You aren’t doing anything. I straightened my stalk.

Right now, I was rooted close enough to the exit of the death​-​odored cave that, with the heat of eternal summer reaching for me, I cooked slightly. Or imagined I did. Regardless, I was close enough to see that the sun had gyred around the sky and was poised to peek into this cave before long.

I could recite to you whole lists of reasons to rest here and contemplate like this — there was my plan to consider, now that I’d decided I’d kill the high priestess of Avelt; there was the heat (even on an eclipse day like today, the heat slightly melted you); then there was the endeavor of climbing out of the canyon at all.

The last of those excuses rang truest of all. Getting down here to the cave mouth had been trouble, and that was getting down. I prayed for elevation.

I could have waited day​-​spans by this cave mouth. But it wasn’t as though anyone had ever outwaited the sun, not in centuries.

When you got stuck in a mental loop like this, it was never something inside you that broke you out, not really.

A cloud passed in front of the sun. Simple, yes. But that shade cast over the canyon — what could I say? It enticed. I appreciated shade. Who didn’t?

It was like a leap or inversion, taking to the air. Gripping my sunshield in a grasper tentacle, I crouched and pushed off with my stalk even as it inverted back into me.

Quickly, magic snapped through my tresses and then flowed. Even as the magic exuded from the cnidae, I felt it reflect off the ground and return as a gentle push upwards. Slack the flow, just a bit, and the push slacks.

Like that, levitation.

Equilibrium in this came naturally to others (….or else I was that much inferior), but for me I would correct and overcorrect, anxious feeler tentacles waiting for that telling rise or fall of air that meant the flow was just so slightly imbalanced.

Awful, dreadful, exhausting.

This sort of treading levitation was a true headache of a technique – but directed levitation, that was a little better. I angled my tresses, and the magic flowing out pushed me along. Slowly at first — it gave me time to lift my near​-​forgotten sunshield and, holding it between me and the light, I was spared a withering affliction when I breached into the sunlight.

For the moment, I floated above the ledge jutting out from the canyon wall. It had been big enough to land on when I’d leapt down from on high, but small enough that now I only trusted my wobbling levitation moments before it would send me slipping down an edge.

Moments presently slipping away.

I had a chance — one chance — and I was poised to wait and waste it. I flexed some internal muscles, lowered some magic blocks, and the outward flow snapping down my tresses became a proper blast. I flew out from the cave mouth, careening promisingly toward the height of the opposite canyon wall.

You could see the whole expanse from up here. The cave itself crouched like a diminutive thing, and this high, past this angle, it was only seen for how the climbing vines and clinging corals strongly avoided it.

A detail without which I may never have found it, and may never have found my purpose within it.

The colorful leaves of the vines and the fertile polyps of the corals swayed and brandished their forms and figures. The vista was only injured by how every odd plant or coral was curled inward and everted to escape the sunlight, or seemed soon poised to.

Where the flora grew not, the ground knew a diversity of rock and dirt. It glittered in the sunlight, the dirt, and at an angle like this the earth looked half colored white. With instinct, I slid a veil​-​membrane over my eye and the world was dim.

What happened next, it was a conscious irony on part of the universe — it had to be. My surveying was at its end and thought of the wall I hoped to land atop had just returned to me.

Too late. The very same instant, I swore, was when the world grew painful and breathless. I smacked against the other canyon wall with a squish, and, in the span of the thought it took to arrest the flow of magic, I had crushed myself a little, magic still pushing me forward.

I was sliding down the jagged canyon face, snags and crooked bits tearing at my sensitive bell. I bodily pushed against the wall. Attached to nothing now, I fell.

I absorbed a breath again, and recovered enough to think to force my magic out once more. It was a panicked blast in panic from my tresses, aimed at the glittering ground, and — after a terrible moment of nothing — it returned to buoy me.

And was pushing me randomly leftward. The angle, it must’ve been so subtly off.

I fixed the angle of my still​-​blasting tresses, and it went on like that, half my mind always on keeping the right angle. Down I floated like that and aground I everted my stalk and rested on it.

(All the while a grasping tentacle had stayed rigid like bone, and the sunshield remained perfectly above me always.)

I took in a vast breath and I did my best to stare long​-​suffering into the vast blue sky.

The cave mouth was perhaps halfway up the canyon wall. I was at the bottom now. My own fault (who else could manage something so stupid?), yet I cursed who I could curse. My parents, my teachers — specifics didn’t matter, I was just everting frustration.

Like earlier, I could rest there on my stalk, stare up in the sky where lonely clouds drifted, and I could contemplate.

But where the warm darkness of the cave invited thought, the blistering heat of the sun and its reflective co​-​conspirator the dirt, they eradicated thought. I couldn’t think for the urge to rip off fronds of plants and fan myself.

Motion. By the opposite wall, in the dead of the sunlight, another hydra was dry and cooking on the ground. But the motion I’d seen, that had been two ravens cloaked in the shiniest black feathers, dancing around the dread hydra just barely larger than they. The bouncing birds made sounds that could be mistaken for laughter, their grunking and rattling, and when that mirth of discovery had burned away they lowered their beaks and feasted upon the warm corpse.

If I dropped my sunshield, how soon would they make a meal of me?

Before I succumbed to that dark impulse, I absorbed a breath, everted my stalk, and forced levitation out of my tresses.

Treading upward again now, with all the headache of wresting control that implies. It grew wild — I was starting to drift about, and bob more and more — but before I hurt myself, I blasted off.

The ledge was still there, and if I could make it to that then I could breathe there, and then fly up to the height of the canyon itself.

Good enough plan, and I was already flying up. It was a small correction to now be angling at the cave mouth.

I undershot, ever so slightly, and got just high enough my eyestalks saw the ledgetop before gravity grabbed me once more.

But I had four grasper tentacles. Even with the one occupied uplifting my sunshield, three burst out from under my bell and held fast to the ledge.

Gravity pulled, and I pulled too. Two graspers was enough to get myself aground, three just made it easy.

Absorb a breath, let it drift out of you. Absorb a breath, drift out. Absorb a breath –

I made it. My insides strobilated just a bit at that. Accomplishment.

Then, of course, my mind caught to what I felt, and reared its ugly head. All that effort I expended, the thing I accomplished? Getting back, exactly, to where I started.

Gods I was dumb.

I looked up to the canyon’s height. Maybe I misjudged. Maybe the cave opening was as far down as a third its height. I undershot last time (I always undershoot, lazy medusa that I am), so I’d just have to double blast this time.

Absorb a breath, steady myself.

I failed last time, but I wouldn’t fail again. I wasn’t that useless.

I am that useless.

The only thought I could manage, staring up again into that vast blue sky, empty of even clouds now.

I said the outside was hostile to thought, didn’t I? The sun and ground conspired to outright eradicated it. Still, I only felt like thinking at this point.

Maybe I deserve to be eradicated.

I indulged the thought only for a second. I was the champion of the night, the death god’s chosen pawn. I had decided I would kill the high priestess of Avelt. If I endeavoured, if I saw the task to its final end, I would succeed — of that, I was assured.

I just had to get up, try again.

But a useless medusa like me — no matter how much I try , I will fail.

(Of that, I assured myself.)

I said it once. When you get stuck in a loop like this, it’s not something inside you that gets you out, not really.

I heard the high, terrible caw. I looked up, wondering if perhaps my end wouldn’t come tortured at the hand of the sun, but a quick, gory death. If, at my end, I too would be feasted upon.

A winged shadow raced across the ground and grew larger in descent.