The Great Sinking

The hold was cramped and colder than I would have imagined it was although, considering that I was not even supposed to be on such a mythical boat to begin with, it was a miracle in itself. The cramped room however was not the height of luxury that this boat of miracles was made out to be. The smell of dirty bodies and the sounds of growling stomachs were like that of a strange song or of a dance that I had yet to know the words of.

“Allan! Come on!” a voice called quietly to my left and I looked over at one of the other stowaways: Adam.

He was already wiggling his way free from the other bodies and he stood in the small open space about three feet across where the door was. It was hot down here, behind the boilers and I smiled at the young man as I made my way out from the little crowd and over to him. He was shorter than me and younger, considering that he was the only other family member that I had managed to convince to sneak aboard this ship with me. There was a light in his dark brown eyes that filled my heart with joy as he stood there and he opened the door slightly.

The corridors here within the bowels of the ship were tight, I was thankful that I was not scared of tight spaces. He was already halfway down the corridor before I was able to catch up to him. Reaching my younger brother, I placed a hand on his shoulder and stopped him before he was able to run out into the and do something stupid.

“Adam, you have to stay with me,” I told him and he rolled his eyes and shook his head.

“Why? Worried about me getting taken?”

“Yes actually I am,” I sighed as I knelt down and placed both my hands on his shoulders. “Listen Adam, we snuck onto this boat, we’re not guests here and we’re not going to be treated like guests if someone spots us,”

“Okay, I’ll be careful but come on at the very least we can walk around out here. I feel like I’m going to die in there.”

Nodding to him, I rose to my feet and let him go carefully, but that was when I felt the boat lurch to one side for a second. The impact was harsh, shaking the metal floor at my feet as though I was on land and it was an earthquake. My eyes went wide as I looked at Adam and the idea of staying hidden was immediately ripped away from my mind: I don’t know how I knew it, but something was terribly wrong.

“Adam, go back and get the others! I’m going to see what’s going on,” I told him quickly and I turned and sent him on his way.

Running out, I pushed my legs up flights of stairs and inhaled harshly after traversing what felt like a dozen flights of stairs. When I reached it, the main portion of what was this unsinkable ship of miracles, I knew for the first time that this was the height of wealth and of power. Beautiful wood and marble flooring, pillars that rose up to meet the ceilings and the grandiose aura that seemed to just exude from the entire ship. But then I could see the people. They were running and frantic and I could see a well dressed man, most likely a server handing out life jackets.

“Get to the top deck! They should be loading the lifeboats now!”

Lifeboats?? What’s going on? I thought as I made my way through the crowds and I reached the man. From here, I could see out of one of the port windows and for a second, I felt as though I must had been imagining it. For a flash of an instant, I saw something reach out and over the boat. But this ship, the glorious Titanic, was massive; I had overheard once that from the keel to the top of the funnels it was 175 feet high. Nothing in the known world could have possibly been that massive. I was already ignoring the man handing out lifejackets, I needed to get a better look at what we had just struck. I was running once more, shoving and forcing my way through the amassing crowd and climbed the flights of stairs until finally I was outside.

Immediately, I was struck by cold air and it took a second for my lungs to adjust and absorb the sharp coldness of the night air. The lights of the Titanic at least illuminated the surface of the ocean in a large area. From here, the sea looked as though it was oil, churning and foaming beneath us as though it was some angry deity. As I stared at the ocean, I could see the red that flashed beneath the water and as I looked some broke out from the sea once more. It was enormous, bigger than anything I had ever seen before and I fell back onto my haunches trying to simply follow it as it rose out of the water into the air. It was dark, made of what looked like iron and covered in stray seaweed and barnacles. It was like a crab’s claw, but blown up to a degree that could not possibly exist in nature. It was serrated and I turned my head quickly and saw that from the other side there was another of those claws as well, rising into the air and dripping saltwater like rain on us all.

A shot cracked through the silence, and I looked over to see a crazed looking man with a suit pointing a gun at the claws and as he pulled the trigger the muzzle flash cast a golden flash over his face and I could see the desperation in his face.

“My God,” I whispered as I looked at it and could feel once more as something crashed into the ship, this time from what felt like below. There was nothing that I could do about this however, how in the world were we supposed to stop whatever hellspawn creature this was??

The night was now full of the crying and screaming of the members of the boat, and I saw as one of the claws came down and pierced through the hull of the ship and seemed to yank it down. The sea came dangerously close to the railing where I stood, but I watched as the massive claw just relinquished its hold on the ship and the Titanic lurched back to a more normal position. The claw was gone beneath the waves once more and I watched as the sea churned under the surface. My heart was in my throat, and I watched as some of the passengers had even abandoned the idea of the lifeboats. They were sobbing, some were deliriously laughing and passing around bottles and flasks of liquor. I watched somberly as four men, a small quartet removed the instruments that they had and began to play.

The hauntingly beautiful melody filled the air and I could not fight the urge that overcame me to cry. But that was not all that I had to focus on. As though shot by lightning, I turned as I was summoned by name.

“Allan!!” Adam’s voice shouted out as he crashed into me. I wrapped my arms around him as I looked over the railing and into the ocean.

A few of the lifeboats had managed to escape into the sea, but that was all for naught as the creature from the depths of hell returned once more and I watched as the claws destroyed the small boats and the poor men and women and children that were aboard it fell into the freezing sea below. The claws breached once more but this time, I realized that there were things on its dark ironlike exoskeleton. The shapes shifted in the darkness and I watched as the claws came back and sank itself into the outer hull of the ship. The salt spray of the ocean stung my eyes and the chill of the air made it feel as though my face had frozen solid but I could not take my eyes away from the creature.

Things leapt off the claws and onto the wooden deck and I stepped back as I realized that impossibly these things were… people.

Men and women were wearing skin tight clothing, but some of them were completely shirtless. Some of them were pale with skin the color of moonlight, others reminded me of my own skin, like that of teakwood. There were great symbols etched into their skin in black. Some were covered in the strange iconography, others with lines and waves of it on their arms or across their chests and backs. The strange beings from the sea brandished weapons, blades and spears of glowing silver and I watched with wide eyes as the man from earlier who had shot at the claws before aimed his small gun at one of the sea-people. The gunshot rang out and I was sure that it struck, but the man from the sea remained standing. He was in front of me, taller than me by nearly three feet and he simply shook his head and called out to the others.

I could not understand what was said, but the man who had shot him was killed quickly and without remorse. Tightening my hold on Adam, the man only looked at me and for a second there was only something in his glowing blue eyes as he held my gaze.

Then he reached towards me.

His hands were like iron as he grabbed my shoulder and he yanked me back and sent me nearly tumbling over the railing. Adrenaline surged in my body as I tried to break free of the hold of the woman who had caught me but she was just as strong as the man was. Her hands felt like iron on my wrists.

“Let me go!” I shouted at her as I cursed. “Adam!!”

“Allan!!”

The man however lifted Adam as though he was lifting a small cat by his collar and he nodded to the woman that held my wrists. Ice filled my blood as she yanked me without explanation to where the claws were still sunken into the hull. Straining, I tried to pull myself free from the woman but she yanked and I swore it felt as though she was going to break my wrists.

“Be still!” she hissed at me and I tilted my head at her, it was the first time I had heard her speak. “We are saving you!”

“Saving me??”

“You have been chosen.”

As we stood on the claws of the beast, the man held Adam over his shoulder and he pressed his fingers to his lips and let out an ear splitting whistle. The claws moved and I was hoisted into the air along with the other sea-people who had arrived and the man that held Adam stood next to me and the woman as the claws only remained there above the water and I watched as the lights of the ship began to die; plunging the North Atlantic into darkness. It would have been a lie however, if I had claimed that I could look away from such a wreck. There was something ironic about it, and the claims that not even God himself would have been able to sink the Titanic.

Yet standing here, on the claws of some creature with men and women who had came from the sea below, I watched as the hubris of man was shown the light and the Great Titanic herself sank beneath the waves.

Turning, I faced the man and the woman who said nothing but only looked upon the destruction that they themselves had wrought. I knew at the very least the woman would be able to understand me.

“What is going on???”

“You have been selected. You are the ones we want within our Empire,” she answered as the claws sank towards the ocean and my heart leapt into my throat. I was going to drown here, all of my life would have amounted to nothing.

We crashed into the sea and sank beneath it and where I expected the immediate sensation of salt water burning my lungs and eyes as it suffocated and killed me, there was nothing. There was instead as I opened my eyes to really look, a dome around the claws of the massive creature that covered us all. Turning to the woman, she grinned at me as she pointed with her hand into the darkness of the sea. I could barely see it, the light in the distance.

“You have been chosen to join the Kingdom of Atlantis.”