Chapter 15

Chaos. Something solid, massive, rushing up from the sea depths in the bubbling havoc. My legs folded, body tensed then sprang me into a surging stroke that took me up until I broke the surface.

Before I could make sense of things, tentacles sprang up around me and sprayed foam everywhere, their silhouettes in the foam like gnarled, charred trees. A silver spray. Ocean gave way to rising land. It was round, smooth, pushing me up with it as it rose dizzyingly quickly, rose several stories high, gouts of oily water slushing off it, my balance lost on its slick surface, hip taking an impact then ricocheting into a falling slide that trembled my field of vision. It was no land at all. I was on an astral kraken, sliding off its enormous ridged conya, off its strange psychedelic patterned flesh.

As I fell to the ocean, a massive tentacle swung through the air to catch me, its rows of suckers exposed in the lashing curve, each the size of a war shield. I twisted my body in midair acrobatics, spontaneously tapping into some quirk of astral physics that let me use my own fall’s momentum to twist into a swoop that lifted me just enough that the plasticine tree trunk of a tentacle swept under me, eclipsed all below, raked the sea's surface into a hurricane blink, stirred enough wind to blow me away like a leaf.

My tumbling drift came to its zenith and a relief shuddered through me—I’d avoided the tentacle’s grasp—but relief quickly mixed with that fluttering pit of a coming fall. I was some 60 feet above water with nothing to stand on. The kraken head was 4 or 5 stories tall. Its orb eyes, pupils like keyholes, tracked my fall hungrily so I gambled on still another improvisation. My limbs tucked into myself, then jackknifed into a shooting dive and I harpooned down to the water far faster than Earth gravity would allow, zooming. 

But this creature was a native not only of this world, but of the sea. Its orb eyes blazed with awareness, and it emitted a strange, shrill pulse that sucked an inky riptide up the watery depths, a gurgling whirlpool that caught my diving arms. I was dragged under, the darkened sea sucking me with its infinite weight.

In the churning, bubbling waters, a tentacle wrapped around me, only its very tip, and still this mollusk limb was twice thicker than an anaconda, its suckers latching to me with a cringing bite. A pained gasp gurgled out of me. One arm was pinned to my side, the other was useless as it struck the creature in panic, felt like striking concrete wrapped with a thin rubber pad. The water line broke. The tentacle lifted me up into the air, dripping quicksilver, brought me closer to the creature until I was face to face with its coruscant eye, its keyhole pupil which passed over me and fixed on the Eclipse Gate. The titan churned water as it crept closer to the gate and its leylines and archipelago of floating stones.

“I—mean—no harm.” I choked out a bizarre attempt at diplomacy. The creature evidently spoke no language but even so, I felt its thoughts: territorial, impartial, raptorial. “Just—a traveler!”

It saw me more as food, a difference of opinion.

The tentacle brought me closer to its gaping beak of a mouth, big as a door, where water lapped in and out and a floating stone bounced off its sharp curve.

Ngh! Cagg! Panic shuddered through me as I struggled. If this thing destroyed my body then this dream journey would be over and if it severed my silver cord...  this life would be over. I would die not just a dream death but a true one.

My cries, my flailing protests and hammerfists were insectlike to the the kraken’s omnipotence. It studied me a moment then with vexed disinterest it curled its tentacle and brought me as a morsel toward its beak.

If I could just—m-my arm—with every last drop of will I recalled my training, snatched a floating stone from the air, a rock that fit in my choking grip. They say that in life or death moments people can get supernatural surges of strength. Whether it was this or the subtle laws of the Astral World or a combination of both, the force with which I hurled the stone was so intense that the projectile sparked with scorching Mana and punctured the creature’s eye so that it spewed etheric blood.

 Its roaring spasm sent the sea to quaking gasps and set me free of the twitching tentacle for a split moment in which I madly fell to the sea and began slicing the water in a swim that was practically flight.

 The floating rock’s surface was sharp against my limbs as I clung to it, lizardlike, slowly rotating with it so that I caught a sneaking glance at the dotted vapor on the distant horizon where the gate was still ringed by stones and guarded by the kraken. The giant creature seemed jealously fixed to the gate, had chased me only so far as it would remain in clear sight. Whether the gate’s creator had set the kraken as a guardian or whether the creature had merely developed a covetous possession of it, dragonlike, I was unsure. All I knew was that it was beyond reasoning with and beyond battling with—I’d tossed a few stones and couldn't replicate the earlier spark, not that doing so would have made it a sure choice—and my time in the Astral was running low, my time in the chamber couldn't last forever.

This thing is beyond me...

I glanced back in the direction of the skull island from where I came.

But perhaps it’s not beyond another...

The eternally burning faces seemed to shriek and gnash more zealously with each moment the roiling cloud chased me. The green haze cast over the silver surface intensified, expanded with that tremulous rancor of something that will soon explode. My swimming intensified, silver sheet breaking again and again under kicking feet and stiff palms and I hoped to Mog I knew what I was doing.

I was playing matchmaker.

The kraken shriek of welcome visibly echoed into waves: It didn’t like its date.

The two titans’ silhouettes dominated the skyline. They seemed to forget me a moment and instead latched their nebulous attention on one another, in warring instincts to consume and possess and grow.

Tentacles thick as overpasses, cloud swirls strong enough to juggle cars, they made the sea crash in their charge.

Me, I got the hell out of there, water frothing behind me.

Amid frantic strokes, I glanced back and saw the roiling cloud’s green flashes quicken as the kraken lashed it apart with its whips. Just as I dove, it detonated. The soundwave alone shook the entire sea, and a world quake followed. Amidst the chaos, a metaphysical shock: I didn't inwardly call to Mog in the life gamble but to the Self Reflecting Light, to its avatar, the angel I had met, and subconsciously hoped he remembered my name and that his promise held true. But whatever ill formed prayers swirled in my mind they were soon blasted to cagg by the ocean transmogrified into one big pillar of froth.

The sea wailed strange echoes. It had turned to oil dotted with green embers. A layer of nauseous mist lingered all around. The sea was darker around the gate, it even seemed denser for a circumference the size of the old sphere auditorium. I floated semiconscious amid the lingering foam ripples.

My limbs struggled to adjust to this water’s subtly different viscosity, the water now darker too, still iridescent, like oilI. I gazed  about me, unsure of what the detonation had done. There were strange aches running through me as if my body were made of cracked glass, but that didn't matter now as the fog began to settle.  It didn't matter at all.

The gate. The gate endured, its leylines and floating stones had endured. And so had I. There it was. The gate. Less than 50 Paces from me now. I pulled myself up onto the waters surface. I dripped quicksilver as I walked. The gate was a smoking doorway. For the first time this entire journey, I smiled.