From The Dark

From The Dark

For an eternity, there was only the dark. I had no word for it then, the enveloping blackness that cradled me and fed me morsels of flesh and held me tight, pressed against my body like an embrace. I was small and blind and afraid of what lay outside the confines of the stone I could feel with my outstretched arms. I called the darkness mother, I ate algae, and I grew.

I stretched beyond the warmth of my cradle, where my belly was warmed by the ground beneath me. In the weighty depths, I stretched my arms out beyond the cavern and found life in the algae and floating bits of decaying animals that floated down to me. The food gave me energy and strength and with every bite, the need for more.

The great night beyond my home chilled me to my core but fed me lantern fish and crustaceans and cuttlefish, textures and meat and soft shells that tore easily in my beak. Fed and free to move, I grew until the midnight zone could no longer hold me.

I left my mother darkness and searched, timidly at first, then farther and higher than my cave until the darkness gave way to gray. In the gray were bigger prey and predators that hunted me while I hunted. But I brought my darkness with me and raced away from them as they floundered in confusion, too used to the light to follow in the inky black that filled the water in my wake.

Food was no longer as scarce, and I ate a hundred times my fill of fish in every current of the sea. No prey was large enough to sate me. As I hunted endlessly in the chill of those waters I learned. I learned the route the giant tuna took in their migration. I learned the language of the whales and how to listen to their approach and avoid their passing.

I learned that some sharks were food and others were better left alone, and how to tell that by their shape and smell, instead of risking my limbs to touch. I learned that my beak was strong enough to crush shells, and my clubs deft enough to pull the soft innards out of hard creatures to feed on.

Above me, the water was warm, and below, it was frigid. I feared the warm water, which was the home of the whales who sang and sometimes dove to try to catch me. They were not alone as I was. They traveled in packs and hunted and sang to each other to trap me.

So, I ate until I was as large as the largest hunters, and I filled the ocean with ink to escape, or I pulled the weak down with me, embraced them just like the blackest deep had done for me, but my limbs crushed creatures with bones, a weakness I didn’t share.

Above all, as I grew and hunted and fed and avoided the sharp teeth of those who would feed on me, I learned, and as I learned, my curiosity about the surface grew. Finally, on a day free of hunting songs and raspy, grating sharkskin and full of the carcass of a blunt-nosed white whale that I’d caught in my arms on its way to the depths, I ventured toward the pale water above.

My eyes, large enough to gather light where there was none, burned as I rose.

Near the surface I discovered a whole world I’d never pictured; painful and bright and so hot that I dove away from it, deeper than I meant to, deep enough that the water chilled me and my boneless flesh pressed against my hearts, limiting my breath.

It was a comfort, though, that tight embrace against my skin, the way my arms felt heavy as they trailed behind me in the water. I happened to feel a cuttlefish between my clubs and grabbed on instinctively, bringing it to my mouth without hunger.

Mother darkness fed me again. All I had become was nothing down here. I pushed down to find my cave, the cradle of my existence, and I remembered. In that place that was deeper black than my ink, I reached one club into my first home. No more of me fit now, and I puffed out against the deep sea’s embrace in pride and recalled the first bit of soft meat that had floated into my tentacles.

Whatever it was, it had come from above, from a world where I longed to feed with abandon. I shot from the night into twilight, rested, and fed on a swordfish that tangled itself in my arms. It hardly struggled, old and weak, falling behind its family. It was an easy meal, but dissatisfying. It filled my belly but provided no new understanding of our world. I needed a different prey.

Still, I waited in the dusk, hunting until I’d eaten every kind of prey I could find at the. Lobsters and small squid alike filled my stomach. All were prey to me. Finally satisfied that there was nothing more to learn, I floated up, through forests of kelp and clouds of plankton until the brightness blinded me and I fled again. This time, only just deep enough to see.

When my eyes adjusted to the light, I made my way to the surface and found new prey and new knowledge. I learned that above my world was another. It was dry and it hurt my skin if I stayed too long in it. I learned that the world was split into air and water and that there were birds that swam in that air and rested on the water. The birds made a sad meal. They were light and had very little meat and hollow bones that snapped without effort.

I learned that, like the water, the air held both light and dark, and in the darkness, there were smaller lights that seemed at first to hover but also swam in the next layer of the air ocean, out of reach of the birds. Nothing I consumed told me what those lights were, not even the big solitary light that looked like a giant squid eye.

It swam alone among the many that were alike, as I did. I stretched out my longest arms to it, offering my embrace. Wisey, the large eye kept its distance, and my appetite was not sated with the knowledge that it could bring.

There was plenty of other food in the warm bright ocean, though. There were fish I’d never eaten before that swam into my tentacles without fear, realizing too late what they’d done. There were more whales and porpoises and dolphins and anemones that waved their arms from the coral. Everything I consumed increased my knowledge and my hunger for more.

Then, one restful day, I felt something disturbing the water nearby. It groaned and rumbled and churned until my body turned pale from fear and anticipation. This was something new.

Perhaps too bold, I swam closer. There was no song, just a rhythmic grinding that pulsed and echoed through the water, louder as it churned over me. I reached out with one arm, lightly surveying the smooth, hard shell of this new creature that smelled of the rocks down in the deep. The great beast caught my arm in its great, revolving tails and I recoiled in pain as it tore the limb from my body. The beast continued without slowing.

As is the way of such things, my club sank out of sight to feed those below.

Shocked by the loss, I flexed my remaining arms. It was not the first time that I had fed the smaller creatures, bites torn from me in my battles. Angry and inflamed, I followed the wake of the beast. It moved tirelessly and I lost it in the foam of a terrible storm. Water fell from the air and the waves tossed me until I had no choice but to take to the still deep to rest.

When the storm ended, I returned to the surface. The beast was gone, but I found a smaller cousin and broke its shell open in my arms, devouring the small, fleshy things inside as I always did. Larger and larger prey fell to my grasp as I learned the ways of these surface creatures. I couldn’t find the great beast that had taken my limb.

For years I hunted, crossing paths with others like it. My skin would pale and I would spray ink and flee, hating myself and those great beasts and the slick ink they left in their wake to sicken birds and fish and whales without discretion or remorse.

Fear kept me from embracing them and dragging them into the deep. Hate made me follow and keep hunting for the one. But as I fed on the smaller beings that lived in their hard shells, I kept learning. I learned that they were made for air and not water. They were fragile, their thrashing often ended before my tentacles wrapped around them.

I learned that they had a name for me. Kraken.

They had stories of those who had come before. Of huge wooden ships that had sunk in the deathly embrace of giants I’d never seen. These small, fragile creatures moved over the water instead of in it and tasted of the toxic sheen their vessels left on the water and the air and of fish and substances I’d never found elsewhere.

But I learned from them, that they called themselves human with pleasure like they called me kraken with a deep, primal terror. They sang to one another like whales, but they hunted them. They lived together in families but also killed one other but didn’t eat their kill. From them, I learned what compelled me to find the great beast was hatred. For my lost arm, but more for my fear.

Revenge.

The word was foreign, but the bite of it sat at home between my hearts and made me snap my beak at the great eye and the small lights far above the ocean. The humans hallowed the tiny lights that looked like angler lures from the midnight zone. They named them and followed them across the sea like flashing bait on a fisherman’s hook.

They spawned the great beasts and rode them across the water, poisoning us, mindless to the death and pain left in their wake. They named their creations, too. Boat, Ship, Schooner, Tanker— they all carried people.

I stopped searching for the one great ship that took my arm and attacked every vessel in my path, not pausing to feed. The people screamed and I screamed back and rent their bodies like kelp, spilling their blood on the water for others to feed on.

Sharks gathered to me, just out of reach of my tentacles. They followed me through the warm ocean to the ice, never attacking, eating the dead I left along my path. I was a god in the ocean, a monster to those above. My destruction grew and so did my following. The whales sang of me and learned to listen for my approach and avoid me. I took my pick of the prey and my followers brought me more. I grew fat on hatred and consumption and I hunted the ocean over, looking for ships to destroy.

I forgot the pressure of the midnight embrace. I forgot the chill and the heat and the tiny things that kept me full and made me grow. I forgot the thrill of besting a sperm whale and the rush of spreading my ink in the water to confuse my enemies.

I had grown large enough to devour the entire ocean. My disciples feared me, worshiped me, lived under my outstretched tentacles, and didn’t fight when I chose from among them for a meal. The sea bowed to me and still I hunted. Ships became more difficult to find and tear.

I forgot the object of my hate and let myself be distracted by petty things that were too easy to destroy. I stopped swimming and floated just below the surface of the water, waiting for a predator to challenge me.

The sharks were the first to abandon me, disappearing into waters closer to the edge of our world, drawn back toward their hunting patterns by instinct. They didn’t matter. Neither did the tuna and sturgeon and sunfish that fled for their migrations, or the rays that followed. The last to leave were the smallest, mackerel, salmon, and sea bass. Fish that I’d long forgotten the taste of in favor of larger prey.

They waited—until the call to return home and mate was so strong, I could feel its pull on their small, silver bodies. I chased them off, flailing my tentacles at them. My hunger left me. The slowly plodding lights in the dark sky held no wonder for me.

My first breath had held no purpose. I had found purpose in knowledge, and again in revenge. The loss of it was as keen and excruciating as the loss of my arm. I resigned myself to be cooked by the great blinding light that hid the air darkness behind it.

The great squid eye watched me in the darkness and I watched it shrink to nothing and disappear before it returned. Barnacles waved from their colonies along my body, my flesh scorched and cracking from exposure to the air. Only my hearts beat on, pushing water over my gills as I waited to die and become food for another.

Then, just as I was ready to let myself sink into the abyss and never return to the warm surface of the great sea, I felt a rumbling, rhythmic pulse through the water, the force of which rippled along my arms and body, making my beak snap in surprise.

Without thinking, I curled my arms into my body, then unfurled them, stretching to lengths I hadn’t felt in too long. I dove several fathoms under the choppy water, to where the waves stopped, but not the pull of the current.

I waited—until I could sense the heading and speed of the great beast, the tanker, far above. My hearts pounded, pushing water over my gills. My skin darkened and I shot up through the water with more power than a sperm whale, listening for the sound of the water breaking on the great beast’s bow. It altered course, but too late. I was on it, my head slamming into the side, my arms reaching up, up, almost high enough to wrap around the prow. I was the monster of the ocean. Older than a coelacanth, longer than a blue whale, deadlier than a mako, I tore into the heavy metal side and slung my arms high enough to bring down the mast. Small, soft bodies fell into my arms as the ship pitched, many impaling themselves on the barbs in my suckers.

I embraced the beast with all my strength and pulled it down with me. One fathom and the living creatures stopped pouring out of the jagged holes I’d torn. Two fathoms and the beast ran out of air and fell faster. Three, four, five. I was blind with rage, tearing pieces of the ship off even as the ocean ran with my blood from the wounds in my arms.

Purpose again.

But the ship kept falling faster, and my focus became my greatest threat. We were in the trench, my enemy and I, my body scraping along the stone wall as we sank together. My skin was purple with rage, but my agonized arms were lethargic and slow.

I barely felt when we landed, the ship pinning me to the ocean floor. I was exhausted from the fight and bleeding; my arms numb and still under the body of the beast. The beast’s grinding, pulsing heart had stopped. The lights that showed the humans their way had gone dark.

The night sky was gone, and the great squid-eye moon and the fish made of light that the humans called stars. The whales, sharks, and fish that had been mine were nowhere to be found. With the last of my strength, I wrapped my arms around the hull of the great beast and squeezed until it released its black, oily ink and I was again embraced by the dark.