Lord of the Sea

The day I met the Lord of the Sea was only three days before you all did. I was a trend setter if you will. 

A crown of salt woven through with weeds. Limbs made from timber and twisted steel joists. And loins, if you’ll forgive me, carved from whale bone. Creamy blue and soft to the touch. 

You could not help but tremble. 

He was in a rage. I, a supplicant, knelt before his throne, throat crushed from drowning, eyes squeezed flat from the hellish pressure of these depths. 

Before me, as I prayed, he laid down the bodies of children. Each one placed more lovingly than the last, a dainty shroud of star fishes and lichen covering their modesty. 

“Have you come to claim your kin?” his voice a squall of ink and sand. 

“My kin?” I fumbled. I tried to explain. I tried to speak but, well, he was in no mood for it and my mouth was full of brine.  

He’d collected their bodies, preserved them as best he could. Laid his royal hands upon them and lifted up their spirits upon his tusks. He kept them safe for us, ready for the day we came for those we had lost. 

I bowed my head and he knew that we were not coming. They had been exiled, hurled into the abyss for our crimes. Our consciences abandoned, cast adrift in a black storm of our indifference. 

“Don’t you call out their names at night?”  

I forgot myself and replied, “What names?” 

He stared. 

Mouth open in a tidal shriek, he revealed a thousand tendrils reaching out to taste me. And that was that. As the anemones probed my soul the deed was done. From that moment he knew that we would not come, and that he would have to take his collection to us. 

Three days later you met him. You all met him. Filth and rage and astonishment. A hundred dead children held aloft as his drowning banner.